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Indian Basket Grass, near Gunsight Lake, Glacier Park 



Skyline Camps 

A Note Book of a Wanderer in Our 
Northwestern Mountains 



By 

Walter Prichard Eaton 



Illustrations by 
Fred H. Kiser 



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W. A. WILDE COMPANY, Publishers 






DEC 2 7 7? 

(g)CU692563 



The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to 
Fred H. Kiser, of Portland, Oregon, less for the photo- 
graphs which illustrate this book, and which speak for 
themselves, than for the weeks of pleasant companion- 
ship on the high trails, and the skillful guidance into 
wild and pleasant places. Few people realize the 
hardihood and the love of the wilderness required to 
make a good nature photographer, both of which 
qualities Mr. Kiser possesses in eminent degree. He 
has led mc into some ticklish places to get a picture, 
but they were always ten times more ticklish for him 
— and they were always worth it. 

W. P. E. 



Skyline Camps 
copykight, 1922, bv w. a. wildk co. 
Printed in U. S. of America. 



CONTENTS 

I 

In Glacier Park 

Storm and Shine on the Divide ... 3 
PiEGAN Pines and Gunsight Pass ... 39 
Wild Strawberries 58 

n 

Lake Chelan 
Lake Chelan 67 

m 

Interlude — On the Hills of Home 

On the Hills of Home — The Appalachian 

Trail 81 

IV 

Crater Lake 

Birds of the KoauE Kiver . . . .107 
The Bluest Lake iij the World . . . 127 

V 

Mount Jefferson 

From Bend to Minto Pasture . . . 163 
The Ascent of Mount Jefferson . . . 194 



CONTENTS 

VI 

Sentinels of the Sage 

Sentinels of the Sage 223 

vn 

The Columbia Highway 
The Columbia Highway ... 237 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

"Indian Basket Grass, Near Gunsight Lake, 
Glacier Park" (Frontispiece) . 

"Continental Divide in the Background, 

Seen Across Lake McDermot" . . 4 

"Ascending Continental Divide Near Flat 

Top — Northern Glacier Park" . . 22 

"Alpine Garden at 8000 Feet — Glacier Park ; 
Moss Campion, Forget-me-not, Grasses, 
etc." 30 

"Our Party Climbing Through Desolation to 
PiEGAN Pass. The Cliff of Mt. Gould on 
the Left is Recommended to Dolomite 
Fans" 46 

"Shore Line of St. Mary Lake, One of the 

Loveliest Sheets of Water in America" . 50 

"Gunsight Peak From Gunsight Pass" . 52 

"Our Party Crossing the Great Drift on the 
Way to Gunsight Pass. Cleft of Pass 
Can Be Seen in the Centre of Picture" 54 

"Lake Ellen Wilson From Gunsight Pass" 56 

"Lake Chelan From War Creek Trail" . . 74 



ILLUSTRATIONS - Continued 

Page 
"North Fork of Bridge Creek, Above Lake 

Chelan" 78 

"The Author's Camp at Crater Lake" . . 136 
"Crater Lake After an Early Snowfall — 

Wizard Island Crater in Centre" . . 142 
"The Phantom Ship Seen From Garfield 
Peak, Crater Lake. Mt. Scott in Back- 
ground" 148 

"The Phantom Ship — Crater Lake" . . 154 
"Mt. Jefferson From Grizzly Lake. One of 
America's Most Beautiful and Most Dif- 
ficult Mountains" 186 

"Crossing a Dangerous Rock Chute on the 
Great Western Traverse of Mt. Jeffer- 
son." (Photographed by the Author) . 200 
"A Rare Photograph of the Summit Cone of 
Mt. Jefferson, Taken From About 10,000 
Feet. The Foreground Snow is Actually 
Inclined 45°. The Ascent of the Cone 
Has to be Made on the Left Hand Edge" 204 



TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN 




HE memory is a curious thing — at 
least, mine is. In certain directions 
it scarcely functions at all. I can- 
not spell, I cannot remember names, 
it is only after several meetings that 
I can recall faces, and I possess a rather merciful 
ability to forget the plots of books and plays. Yet 
I can follow a trail through the mountains or the 
forest for a second time, after a gap of ten years 
(unless the lumbermen have been in during the in- 
terval), each guiding rock and tree, each dip and 
turn, coming back to me with the familiarity of a 
friend; I can draw a fairly accurate map of any 
golf course I have ever played; and I don't think 
I have forgotten completely a single one of all the 
camp fires I have built. 

For that matter, however, who ever does forget 
his camp fires? With what joy, or perhaps relief, 
they are kindled, and with what wistful regret they 
are left behind, a pile of charred and water-soaked 
coals ! There may be some people who camp from 



TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN 

a sense of duty, or resemble a man I once knew 
who sought for advice about " roughing it " in the 
West. We asked him how rough he wanted it, and 
he replied that of course he would desire a room 
with a bath. To such people this book is certainly 
not addressed, nor even to the de luxe camper some- 
times encountered doing the regulation tour of our 
national parks, with everything but a cow in tow. 
Such a one I met in the Rocky Mountains, Avith a 
pack train staggering under all the comforts of 
home, from chamber to wine cellar. She was an 
authoress, and the following winter delighted her 
large urban (and suburban) following with her de- 
scriptions of the glorious, primitive life of the trail. 
However, her train went its way, and ours took an- 
other pass, dropping down into a wilderness of 
ghost-like cedars, the very wood where Hop-o'-my- 
Thumb scattered his crumbs. But the comments of 
our cook upon the party we had encountered would 
greatly enliven this page, had I the audacity to 
print them. It was this same cook — Dad, we called 
him — who remained behind when we broke camp 
one morning, to help one of the guides round up a 
horse that had strayed away in the night. That 
evening Dad rode into the new camp an hour be- 
hind us — alone. 

" Where's Charlie? " we inquired. 



TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN 

" If God Almighty don't know where Charlie is 
any better'n I do, he's lost," Dad answered. 

From which the general nature of Dad's remarks 
on the pack train de luxe may be inferred by any 
one remotely familiar with camp cooks in the great 
Northwest. 

No, the reader who, I hope, will follow me over 
the skyline trails of our western mountains, where 
my memory kindles again those pungent fires of 
resinous wood, and the ice-water brooks go tinkling 
past in the mountain twilight, will be one who knows 
and loves the freedom of the wilderness, the silence 
of the high places, the exhilaration of conquest over 
glacial slope and precipice, and, above all, the pro- 
found and mystical peace which descends like a 
benediction on the day, when camp is made at last, 
when the fire reddens one tiny fragment of the star- 
bright dark, when a lone coyote howls in the dis- 
tance, and this thing we call Civilization is less than 
the shadow of a dream. 



In Glacier Park 



1 



STORM AND SHINE ON THE DIVIDE 




ANY GLACIER HOTEL, an im- 
posing and not unattractive struc- 
ture built of western fir, sits on the 
shore of Lake McDermott, more 
than fifty miles from a railroad, fac- 
ing as noble a mountain prospect as this continent 
affords. Directly across the lake, thrust eastward 
from the Continental Divide, is a sharp, pyramidal 
peak, dividing the panorama in half. To the left, a 
few miles back, the Divide rises to the great gray 
battlements of Mount Gould, and holds suspended 
on its upper shoulders the white field of Grinnell 
Glacier. To the right, the Swiftcurrent valley leads 
the eye again to the Divide, on this side dominated 
by the cone of Mount Wilbur. Over this mirror 
of green water, this sharp leap of pointed fir and 
pointed precipice, this more distant endless rampart 
of marching rock, of naked summit and ageless 
snow, broods a sky so clear, so utterly transparent, 
that the sunset colors are the tintings of eternity. 
And in this hotel the tourists gather to play at be- 



4 SKYLINE CAMPS 

ing followers of the high trails. It is an excellent 
place to rough it — with a room and a bath. 

How well I recall one day when a stir went 
through the lobby at the news that a certain great 
man was arriving, a painter famous on two conti- 
nents, now condescending to return to the continent 
which he had honored by choosing it for a birth- 
place, that he might confer a further honor by 
painting some of its scenery. We did not see him, 
however, until breakfast, a disastrous meal for him. 
In a word, the coffee. It was not right. The ut- 
most efforts of the waitress could not get it right. 
The dining-room soon grew aware of his contempt 
for American coffee, American waitresses, and, in- 
ferentially, for America in general. When at last 
he mounted his horse to ride the trail in search of a 
fitting subject for his illustrious brush, such a scowl 
sat upon his Olympian brow that Briggs would 
have rejoiced at a perfect model for one of his car- 
toons, "And so the day was utterly ruined." 

Not long after we had thrown our last diamond 
hitch, and not having expected too much of coffee 
fifty-five miles from a railroad and a cow, jogged 
our pack train into a trot across the echoing bridge 
over McDermott Falls, and then headed up the 
Swiftcurrent Trail, gay with the wine of the moun- 
tain air. 



o 



» 




ON THE DIVIDE 5 

We were provisioned for several days, and our 
possible objective was JNIount Cleveland, many 
miles to the north, and the highest summit in Gla- 
cier Park. However, we did not greatly care 
whether we reached Mount Cleveland or not, the 
ascent not being difficult enough to make it at- 
tractive above any other adventures that might 
happen by the way. The preceding winter had 
been unusually severe, and the snow still lay in 
great drifts on the summits and flanks of the 
Divide, even blocking some of the passes. Granite 
Chalet, just over the summit of Swiftcurrent Pass, 
had not yet been opened for tourist accommodation, 
and beyond that point the trail was entirely prob- 
lematical. No ranger had been through it that sea- 
son, and after a winter of heavy snow a trail through 
virgin forest can be a difficult affair. So much the 
better! Three double-bitted axes were handy on 
our packs, and our time was our own. 

When you speak of a pass, you ordinarily vision a 
deep gap between two mountains. But that is not 
what you will find a pass to be in the Rockies. The 
main chain of the Rocky Mountains of Montana is 
what the geologists call a " fault." In times so 
remote that only H. G. Wells is quite sure about 
them, the earth crust cracked, buckled, and one 
edge of the crack slid eastward a dozen miles over 



6 SKYLINE CAMPS 

the other, thus exj)osing a solid wall, running north 
and south, many thousands of feet high, with its 
greatest elevation at the point where the upper crust 
lay over the edge of the under. Glacial action and 
erosion have now carved valleys and gorges and 
canons leading into this wall, and hewn its summit 
into fantastic peaks and battlements, doubtless 
greatly lowering its original altitude. But the 
wall itself still stands, strata after strata of the 
earth's crust exposed in multi-colored nakedness of 
rock and shale. It is only a spine in places now, 
but it is always at least that, — the spine of a conti- 
nent, the Great Divide. Every erosion valley that 
leads up to this towering wall, a valley threaded by 
a rushing green stream and often strung with little 
green lakes, ends smash at the base of the precipices, 
apparently in a cul-de-sac. 

Yet in reality it is not an impasse, but the pass 
itself. Once having reached the head wall of the 
valley, all that remains is to climb that wall and go 
over the Divide at the point two or three thousand 
feet above you, between two higher peaks. The 
head wall of the Swiftcurrent valley, at the apex of 
the amphitheatre, looks unscalable, as indeed it is. 
It is a naked precipice down which come sliding 
silvery white ribbons of water from the glacier that 
hangs on an upper ledge. But just to the right, on 



i 



ON THE DIVIDE 7 

the side wall, the slope is more propitious, and here 
the trail has been cut, making the ascent by a series 
of zigzags, or switchbacks, shorter or longer accord- 
ing to the angle of inclination. On the steepest 
parts of the wall they are so short that the leader 
of the pack train can look down on the heads of 
those in the rear. It is a government trail, how- 
ever, never exceeding a twelve per cent, grade and 
comfortably wide. 

We were still a little saddle-shy, we easterners, 
as our horses tugged up this trail, and, besides, our 
look-off was back down the Swiftcurrent valley, 
over the little green lakes, between the red ramparts 
of the guarding walls, to the far blue plains of 
Alberta, lying level like the sea. What awaited us 
at the summit we could not tell. Nor were we 
sufficientl}^ impressed when we did near the summit, 
the trail leading out upon a snow-field, now melted 
soft like sticky rock salt, and into a thin vapor that 
swept around us with cool, wraith-like fingers. A 
touch of cloud but added zest to the climb. So we 
unpacked our lunch, our cameras, and sketching 
boxes, in the little grassy meadow on the col of the 
Divide which is Swiftcurrent Pass, and where the 
greenish-gray ground squirrels were scampering by 
the score, disappearing down their innumerable 
holes in apparently mortal terror, only to poke an 



8 SKYLINE CAMPS 

inquiring head out an instant later to survey us 
with alert black eyes. We proposed to remain 
here a while, cloud or no cloud, and investigate the 
small peak just to the south, a peak composed 
largely of broken fragments of rock piled in a care- 
less pyramid. 

As we sat at lunch the ground squirrels became 
more and more friendly. They drew near, they sat 
uj)on their haunches, pressed their forepaws against 
their little stomachs, and emitted squeaks, after the 
manner of a doll which enunciates " Papa " when 
squeezed amidships. Presently, hearing a rustle at 
my side, I turned to see a portion of bread and 
cheese which I had laid on the grass, disappearing 
rapidly down a hole. Before we had finished our 
luncheon, one little fellow had been persuaded to 
climb up on our knees, and even to sit on our hands 
to secure a coveted morsel of food. 

But here, above the timber, on the almost naked 
spine of the Divide, the ground squirrels were not 
our only companions. As we left them nosing 
around for fallen crumbs, and started up over the 
rocks, I was suddenly aware of a large bird which 
ran scurrying away, almost from under my feet, 
with a warning note not unlike that of a partridge 
hen. Amid the gray and brown stones, and under 
the driving scuds of mist, this bird was curiously 



ON THE DIVIDE 9 

protected by the color and texture of her feathers, 
and after she had gone fifty feet I could hardly 
have told what became of her, even if I had watched 
more carefully. As a matter of fact, however, I 
was more intent on what was taking place near the 
spot where she had first appeared. What looked 
like seven little stones — I think there were seven, 
though I could not be sure — were scurrying away 
in among the larger rocks, and in less time than it 
takes to tell it, every one had vanished completely 
from sight. I went on, not wishing to terrify the 
mother ptarmigan too greatly, and wishing, also, 
to watch her, from a distance, as she reassembled 
her brood. But this sight was denied me. Either 
she did not come back till we were out of sight, or 
the visibility was so low in the mist that her protec- 
tive coloration quite hid her. The latter might easily 
have been the case, I should say, if she had chosen 
to return. Living up on the heights, without the 
shelter of trees and almost without the shelter of 
shrubs, the ptarmigan would be a fair mark for any 
hawk or eagle unless it were for this protective col- 
oration, this extraordinary resemblance between 
feathers and stone. 

We had not climbed far up the rock-piled peak 
before another example of protective coloration be- 
came visible, when a small stone resting on top of a 



10 SKYLINE CAMPS 

large flat one suddenly came to life and slipped 
over the farther edge. I ran around the boulder 
after it, and it ran away from me in the opposite 
direction, like a boy playing tag around a tree. So 
I stepped back a few paces and waited, with camera 
ready, till it poked its head around the corner to see 
if I had gone. My developed film showed an ex- 
cellent portrait of a boulder, but few people can 
find upon it the head and shoulders of Mr. Whis- 
tling Marmot (western cousin to our woodchuck) 
until his features are carefully pointed out to them. 
The white and the dark patches on his muzzle, chest, 
and back are so neutral against the rocks that he is a 
difficult fellow to photograph in his native environ- 
ment. 

This chap, too, was curiously indifferent to us. 
To be sure, he got off the rock at our approach, but 
he didn't even make an attempt to reach any safe 
shelter. An eastern woodchuck, born two hundred 
feet from a dwelling and feeding all his life in the 
hayfield, would have been far more wary. All he 
wanted was to be left alone on that flat boulder. As 
soon as he was photographed, and we had moved on 
up the slope, he got back to his original perch, and 
lay once more in what hazy sunlight there was, as 
inert as a stone. Fifty feet above him I paused and 
tossed back a pebble, which hit close to his side. He 



ON THE DIVIDE 11 

raised his head a little, and shook it, as if to say, 
" For goodness' sake, can't you leave me alone? " 
Then he went to sleep again. Apj)arently little in 
this mountain world of his had ever dangerously an- 
noyed him, and fear was not one of his guiding 
instincts. I have seen ruffed grouse in the White 
^Mountains show an equal indifference to man, but I 
never saw it displayed by an eastern woodchuck, 
even one which had passed all its life in the deep 
forests. 

A swing to the left, while climbing our peak, 
brought us to the rim of a considerable precipice, 
looking down upon Swiftcurrent Glacier, snow- 
covered now and showing no ice, and upon the 
amphitheatre at the head of the valley. One of the 
rewards of climbing in the Rockies is the profusion 
of precipices that wait to plunge suddenly away be- 
neath your feet. From the valleys and canons below 
they are glorious with color in sunlight, and tower- 
ing, topless and grim when the clouds are over 
them ; but no precipice from below is so thrilling as 
it is from the rim. Perhaps it is a boyhood instinct 
persisting in us which lures us to their brink. The 
small boy climbs a tree, or scales to the ridge-pole 
of the barn, and, looking down, experiences a primal 
thrill. It is hard to say, indeed, whether the dif- 
ficulty of the ascent or the promise of that thrill is 



12 SKYLINE CAMPS 

the more potent impulse to set him climbing. And 
there is much of the boy in every mountaineer, or he 
would not remain a mountaineer. 

When we reached the top of our peak, we looked 
down upon the sharp spine of the Divide, stretching 
southward till it rose to the snow-covered ramparts 
of Mount Gould. On the left, or east side, it 
plunged down a little way to Swiftcurrent Glacier; 
on the Pacific side it dropped at first precipitously, 
and then, by a more gradual wooded slope, into the 
deep hole of Mineral Creek Canon. The top of the 
spine could hardly have been fifty feet wide for a 
stretch of two or three miles, and down the centre 
of it ran a path, — a path as plain, almost, as that the 
farmer makes between the kitchen door and the well, 
save that it was trodden in shale stone instead of 
sod. Yet few must be the human feet that have 
ever walked it. Across this sky-flung bridge be- 
tween two peaks of the Great Divide pass and 
repass the people of the upland wilderness, chiefly 
the sheep and goats, no doubt, seeking new pastur- 
age, but a fox, perhaps, sometimes, and sometimes a 
mountain lion, a grizzly, or a deer. For ages they 
have been using this bridge, till their game trail 
shows plainly even in a photograph — a bridge so 
splendid, so upborne above the valley world, that 
the gods should tread it to Valhalla, while from the 



ON THE DIVIDE 13 

peaks, in thunder, rolled the celestial orchestra- 
tion. 

But the trail was fast vanishing now in racing 
scud. The wind had been rising till it blew a gale, 
and it was bitterly cold. The white, Alpine sum- 
mit of Heaven's Peak across the canon to the west 
went out of sight in a billowing cloud mass. Even 
as we turned to descend, the stinging flakes of an 
unseasonable snowstorm were upon us, driven by 
the wind till they seemed fairly to cut. Yet they 
soaked us, too, as they clung and melted on our 
clothes. It took some little time to get down the 
rocks, made suddenly slippery, gather the horses 
together, and repack. There was no thought now 
of pushing down into the forest and camping. Our 
one desire was to get to the shelter of Granite 
Chalet, a few hundred feet below the summit of 
the pass. 

Presently the building loomed up through the 
scudding white dimness that enveloped and soaked 
us, and without the slightest compunction we 
climbed over the debris of the rear porch, wrecked 
that previous winter by the snow, and broke in the 
kitchen door. It was chill and damp inside, but 
there was a range in the kitchen, and a big chunk 
stove in the office and living-room beyond, and in 
the wreck of the rear porch we had immediate fuel. 



14 SKYLINE CAMPS 

While the guides unpacked the horses, and brought 
in the dunnage and provisions, we set those two 
stoves to roaring, and then hustled out with axes 
for more substantial fuel, timber line being at about 
this point. Once inside, too, the keys of the cha- 
let were offered to us for the taking — they hung on 
a ring under the manager's desk. Blankets and 
bedding were piled neatly on the floor. Each 
could pick up his bed and walk up-stairs to his in- 
dividual bedroom. With the wind howling and 
wailing outside, and every now and again buffeting 
the little building as if in rage at its audacity in 
perching itself up there on the mountain and de- 
termined to knock it loose, with the sleety snow 
lashing the window-panes and the thermometer fall- 
ling rapidly, the chalet seemed an exceeding sweet 
place of refuge. Soon around the chunk stove 
arose the pungent, sharp odor of wet woolen gar- 
ments drying, and overhead the floor creaked as we 
made up the beds for the night. Dad was busy, 
in the kitchen. We had three lanterns of our own, 
and found candles. In the gathering darkness 
Dad served us with "afternoon tea," boiling hot in 
tin dippers, and went back to attend to his cooking. 
On the desk we found copies of last summer's maga- 
zines and even a newspaper or two, and read items 
aloud to show how unimj)ortant the new^s is, any- 



ON THE DIVIDE 15 

way. This pastime suggested to somebody the 
ancient conundrum, "Why is the Boston Transcript 
like a porous plaster? — Because it is good for a 
week back." Boston! How far away it seemed as 
the cabin shook and the gale howled. Darkness had 
come, and the smell of coffee and bacon and potatoes 
from the kitchen, and the voice of Dad crying, 
"Come and get it!" when suddenly we heard a 
stamping on the front veranda, and a great shaking 
and rattling of the door. 

We shot the bolt, and admitted a gust of snow 
and wind which sent all loose papers flying, and be- 
hind it four drenched and cold and snow-crusted 
men, staggering under heavy packs and looking 
as thankful for our presence as they were amazed 
at it. They had hiked up twenty miles or more 
that day from Lake Macdonald, expecting, like 
us, to camp, for they knew the chalet wasn't open. 
When they ran into the storm, they decided, like 
us, to push on to the shelter of a building, though 
it meant climbing into the gale and through the 
snow. But they had almost abandoned hope of 
reaching Granite Park, bewildered by the early 
dusk and the storm, and exhausted by cold and 
wind, when they caught the gleam of our lights. 
All four were young men, from what Montana 
calls the East — which is to say, Chicago. Youth, 



16 SKYLINE CAMPS 

or hardihood, or preferably both, are required of 
any one who would go on foot, especially without 
a guide, over the high trails. 

Their wet garments were soon added to ours 
around the stove, and our increased family sat down 
to supper in the tumultuous democracy of the 
storm. 

But we were to have another guest. He came 
by the back door. We heard Dad deliver himself 
in the kitchen of one of his characteristic but un- 
printable expressions, reserved for the rare occa- 
sions when he was surprised. Then he came in to 
us and invited us to come and view his " exhibi- 
tion ". We went. 

Standing by the stove was a comic-supplement 
hobo. I have never, before nor since, seen any- 
thing so perfect in the hobo line. A small, dirty 
cap was perched upon his head. His face was cov- 
ered with a week's stubble of beard. His ragged, 
patched coat, with dangling sleeves, was caught bj^ 
a piece of rope around the waist, and from this rope, 
on one side, swung a tomato can, blackened by the 
smoke of fires. Below his fringed trousers pro- 
truded a pair of tattered shoes, now soaked almost 
to a pulp. He held his chilled, red hands toward 
the stove, not deigning us a glance, the picture of 
physical misery, yet so utterly a replica of those 



ON THE DIVIDE 17 

impossible cartoons that we almost gave way to our 
mirth. 

And what was he doing here, on the top of the 
Continental Divide, miles — hard, difficult miles — 
from any railroad, any highroad, any human habi- 
tation? We asked him, but he made no reply. 
Left alone later with Dad, warmed by food — our 
food — and the fire, he said that he was looking for 
work. That was the only explanation he ever gave, 
but it branded him as a cosmic humorist, and so 
tickled Dad that he made him up a bed on the floor 
by the kitchen stove — and locked the provisions in 
the pantry. 

That night around the fire we sat in a ring and 
held high converse, friends and strangers, while noAv 
and again somebody slipped out into the darkness 
to observe the diminishing storm, and to report, at 
last, the presence of a star. There is a common 
bond between mountaineers, as there is between 
^'olfers, motorists with their first car, and actors. 
The leader of the four trampers, I soon discovered, 
knew the White Mountains. More than that, he 
was familiar with Starr King's book. Did he 
know the Kinsman trail, and the view over Lone- 
some Lake and across the Notch to Lafayette? 
Had I ever been over the Twins and down the East 
Branch country? Was it true that the lumbermen 



18 SKYLINE CAMPS 

had spoiled the Beaver Brook Trail up Moosi- 
lauke? And then we laughed at our eager memo- 
ries of the little White Hills, here on the spine of 
the continent, under the bridge to Valhalla, where 
the Presidential Range itself would be a footstool. 
Ah, but he too was of Yankee heritage ! The true 
Yankee, I am sure, would stand below Mount 
Everest, thrilled by its majesty, awed by its tre- 
mendousness — and think of Mount Washington. 

Stars were gleaming through rifts in the racing 
sky when we went to bed, but the night riders of 
the wind were still tearing by, vast, invisible horse- 
men who lurched against our shelter till it rocked 
and shook with their buffeting. But in the morn- 
ing summer was back again on the range, and in 
the powder of snow, already beginning to melt, we 
saw the tracks of our comic hobo, pointing east- 
ward up the pass. Dad was examining the equip- 
ment, but nothing had vanished. I think he was 
rather disappointed. The air was clear as only 
Rocky Mountain air can be. Across the dark, 
heavily timbered gorge of Mineral Creek, far be- 
low us, rose the M^hite pyramid of Heaven's Peak, 
sparkling and serene. Southwestward we could 
see far down the canon to the opening where Lake 
Macdonald lay, and beyond that the distant blue 
foothills. Northwestward, ten miles across the 



ON THE DIVIDE 19 

gorge, the white-capped range stretched toward 
Canada. Just over our heads, behind, was the bat- 
tlemented Divide. All this we saw clearly for the 
first time, since we had arrived in a cloud. It 
seemed rather a pity to leave it, and j)limge down 
into the forest. But we put the interior of the 
chalet carefully to rights, thanked it for its hospi- 
tality, and plunged. 

We were on a trail which, whatever its condition 
may be to-day, was then quite unsuited to ordinary 
tourist travel. It was nothing but a rough rang- 
er's trail at best — and we found it at its worst, 
after a severe winter and before any one else had 
ridden it. Moreover, for the first thousand feet it 
was excessively slippery from the snow, and the 
pack horses had to be watched with great care. As 
soon as we got down into larger timber the snow 
ceased entirely, but our troubles didn't. It was a 
magnificent forest we entered, not such a forest, to 
be sure, as those stands of Douglas fir in the Cas- 
cades, but rather more like virgin timber among our 
northeastern mountains. The trees were tall, 
straight, and relatively slender, like masts, seldom 
over thirty inches in diameter, and much more 
frequently not that, but shooting seventy-five or 
eighty feet without a limb. The growth, however, 
was more diversified than in our eastern forests. 



20 SKYLINE CAMPS 

There were almost as many larches as jpines, and 
hosts of spruce and balsam, never in pure stands 
but well mixed. Many of the trees, of course, were 
down, across the trail, and seldom enough had one 
fallen without taking others with it, in a crossed 
confusion of log barricade. Sometimes we could 
ride around these barriers, through the underbrush. 
Sometimes we could jump the log. Sometimes 
neither course was possible, and we either had to 
dismount and lead saddle horses and pack train 
around, searching out a way while the pack animals 
balked and tugged and tried to break, or else un- 
sling the axes and go at the obstruction. We left 
enough four-foot lengi;hs of log on that trail, cut 
out of fallen timber, to have made a respectable 
wood-pile. 

Once down by Mineral Creek, at the bottom of 
the canon, we hoped the old trail north, past Water- 
man Lake into Canada, would be in better shape, 
but for some distance it was even worse. In places 
it was quite washed away, and we had to take to 
the stream bed. We were going up again now, and 
we kept going up steadily, for fifteen miles, glimp- 
sing now and then through the trees the wall of the 
Divide to our right, the western, parallel range to 
our left. The sun was getting low, the shadows 
were creeping over us, as we broke at last out of 



ON THE DIVIDE 21 

heavy woods into those sparser and lower scattered 
stands which denote the approach of timber line. 
We were ascending steeply now, the trail heading 
for a level ridge which blocked the end of the valley, 
and carried the Divide across from the eastern to 
the western range. Naturally, this elevation was 
called Flat Top. No one has yet been able to 
count the number of Flat Tops in the western 
United States. 

As we neared the summit we came out into one 
of those upland parks so characteristic of the Rock- 
ies, a high meadow lush with grass, studded with 
little groves of evergreens, threaded with ice-water 
rills, and walled by great naked precipices of bro- 
ken, many-colored rock. Across this meadow here 
and there lay drifts of snow, and close beside them 
beds of golden dog-tooth violets. On the upper 
ledges were caps and cornices of snow. In the air 
was the tinkle of tiny waterfalls and the whisper of 
water in the grass. In the air, too, was the pun- 
gent smell of balsam, for all the trees here were 
pointed firs. Looking back down the canon, we 
saw the promise of a superb prospect. I say the 
promise, because at the moment we were hanging 
to the horns of our saddles to keep on our horses, so 
dog weary that our esthetic senses were, to put it 
mildly, blunted. 



22 SKYLINE CAMPS 

" Who votes to camp here? " called back the 
leader. 

The only dissenting vote was a neigh from a 
tired pack horse — and he didn't know what he was 
doing. 

We fell stiffly from our saddles, and began to 
unload and unharness. The horses were turned 
out on an uj)per level of the meadows, and we went 
about the various tasks of making camp, string- 
ing the tents between convenient balsams, setting- 
up our collapsible stove, laying a camp fire, gath- 
ering balsam boughs for beds (with, I hasten to 
add, the special permission of the ranger) , and peg- 
ging down the poles on the tent floors to hold these 
boughs in place. A bough bed, if it is not prop- 
erly laid and secured, can be more uncomfortable 
before morning than the naked ground. We had 
no trouble in securing water, for our camp was 
pitched between two little brooks, not fifty feet 
apart, which came tinkling down over the grass and 
the stones from the melting snow on the Divide. 

Our tents were shipshape, our personal dunnage- 
bags convenient to our bunks, a camp fire was snap- 
ping, a wood-pile stacked beside it, and we had 
washed in the brook, when the voice of Dad cried, 
" Come and get it ! " — and we came. 

There was no table. We sat on the grass, on 



ON THE DIVIDE 23 

logs, on anything convenient, in a semicircle before 
Dad's stove, and ate and drank like famished 
things. And as we ate, the esthetic sense came 
back to us (wasn't it William James who said that 
a cup of coffee at the right moment could alter a 
man's philosophy of life?), and we were aware that 
far back down the canon we had ascended the twi- 
light had settled in sombre, mysterious shadow, 
while above it the snow-streaked summits were 
towers and battlements of amethyst, under billow- 
ing canopies of salmon-pink cumuli. Let the an- 
gels have their celestial architecture of jasper and 
gold, said we; for us, the amethyst battlements of 
the Great Divide. 

Then the warm colors faded, the last blush went 
off the upper snow-fields, fold upon fold the moun- 
tains marched in solemn twilight blue, and lo! 
above the western summits hung a star! 

It was quiet in camp that evening. The horses 
had moved up on Flat Top till only the faintest 
tinkle of their bells came down with the whispered 
rush of water falling far away, a sound like the 
ghost of thunder or a steady summer wind. The 
weary guides were already asleep in their tent. 
Dad had washed the last dish (none too carefully, 
I fear), and joined them. Save only our party, 
there were no human beings for many mountain 



24 SKYLINE CAMPS | 

miles. The hermit thrushes had long since ceased \ 

their songs. The snap of the camp fire had given J 

place to the almost inaudible sibilant mutter of | 

hot coals in a bed. Far above us the silence was | 

broken by the crackling roar of a little avalanche; j 

some rock had broken loose from a precipice, and , 

crashed down to the shale heap below. Silence j 

again, and the whisper of the ice-water rills beside ! 

the camp exaggeratedly loud by contrast. Then a } 

rustle and murmur of night wind in the balsams, ■ 
with a whiff of their fragrance. And a sleepy 
" Good-night." 

The bright morning light showed a peak of the 
Divide towering directly over our camp, flanked by 
the sharp, castellated ridge. What lay on the 
other side? We did not know. So far as we were 
concerned, this was unexplored country. Cer- 
tainly there was no trail and no photographic 
record that we had ever seen. Besides, from that 
summit we could undoubtedly glimpse Mount 
Cleveland to the north, and determine whether it 
was climbable after the snow. So we got out the 
Alpine rope, more for the aid of the women than 
from any actual need of it, — or so we estimated 
from the base, — packed lunches and cameras, and 
set blithely out. 



ON THE DIVIDE 25 

After a first ascent over the long shale slope, we 
reached the bottom of an extensive snowdrift, that 
took us rapidly up to the base of a precipice. A 
traverse, leading upward along this precipice, 
where the rope was a comfort as a rail for those 
less used to climbing, brought us to a final scram- 
ble up to the spine of the Divide, just north of our 
objective peak. The Divide here was about eight 
thousand feet, and hardly wider than a country 
road — a knife-blade of jagged rock. On the east- 
ern side, its snowdrifts reaching almost to our feet 
with an upward sweep like surf dashing on a rocky 
shore, lay Chancy Glacier, now a smooth though 
tilted expanse of dazzling white. Its outer edge 
broke abruptly against space. Far out beyond the 
top of this precipice rim the world came into sight 
again — the dark, timbered valley of the Belly 
River, threaded by the translucent green ribbon of 
Glenns Lakes, leading out to the blue ocean of the 
Canadian prairie, and flanked by leaping and 
lonely mountains. Across the invisible canon be- 
low the upper end of Chancy Glacier we could see 
the more than ten thousand feet of Mount Cleve- 
land, its upper slopes and ledges now a solid, 
gleaming white. The storm had made climbing it 
highly impractical for several days, and we were 
not provisioned for the wait; so then and there we 



26 SKYLINE CAMPS 

abandoned the attempt. Not, however, having set 
that climb as our one and only objective, but seek- 
ing, rather, to find whatever of charm or adventure 
might befall, we put our disappointment lightly 
away, roped ourselves in orthodox fashion, and 
went out on the soft snow of the glacier, the boy 
of the party, at least (and I will not say none other 
of us), hoping that perhaps a crevasse would open 
under our tread, and the strength of the rope be 
tested. Alas! there were no crevasses. They 
were still packed solid with snow. No bridges 
caved beneath our tread. Perhaps there are no 
crevasses on Chaney Glacier at any time, though I 
hope for the sake of its reputation that there are. 
But there were none now. We achieved nothing 
more exciting than wet boots. Then four of us 
turned to the peak above, and made the few hun- 
dred feet of toilsome ascent over broken shale held 
just at the angle of repose, where a single step too 
roughly taken can start a baby landslide. 

We were four grown men, and men supposedly 
of something more than inarticulate response to 
beauty, to majesty, to the appeals of nature. One 
of us was a painter, one a photographer, one a 
man who ranges the hills and forests because in no 
other life could he be happy, and one by profession 
calls himself a journalist, and juggles with words. 



ON THE DIVIDE 27 

As we four scrambled up the last pitch and came 
out on the wind-swept summit, scarcely big enough 
to hold us all, scarcely larger than the top of a ta- 
ble, I regret to have to confess, in the interests of 
strict accuracy, that we were not even like the 
wonder-struck exj)lorer who stood "silent upon a 
peak in Darien," dumb with a saving sense of our 
incapacity for expression. We swore. Variously 
and severally, we swore, vulgar, commonj^lace, 
meaningless oaths. Then, by one common impulse, 
we lay flat on our stomachs — in part from an in- 
stinct of self-preservation on that aerial and wind- 
swept table-top — and deliberately spit! Yes, the 
mountaineer remains a small boy. 

We had come out, with no warning whatever, on 
the brink of a tremendous precipice. It fell away 
beneath us for three thousand feet, into a canon 
where a lake reposed and fed a source arm of the 
Belly River. Directly across this canon, sweeping 
up first with a long debris pile of shale, and then 
rising more and more precipitously in strata after 
strata of serrated gray rock till the jagged ridge 
of the long summit cut the sky, nine thousand nine 
hundred and forty-four feet at the highest point, 
boomed the rampart of IMount INIerritt. To take 
over words of sound to describe sight is a proceed- 
ing I should ordinarily condemn, but in this case 



28 SKYLINE CAMPS 

there is no escai^e. This great wall of Blount Mer- 
ritt as surely boomed at us as Kij)ling's dawn 
came up like thunder out o' China 'cross the bay. 
We were four little pygmies, huddled on a sj^ire of 
rock, every sense of us smitten with tremendous- 
ness. As soon as our first instinctive boyish reac- 
tion had passed, we laughed a little sheepishly, and 
sat up to assume the air of lords over our new- 
found creation. In front of us — just one short 
step in front of us ! — was a canon. Behind us was 
another canon. To right and left were hanging 
glaciers. Green lakes lay far below, turning to 
lilac as a cloud trailed a shadow-anchor across 
their shallows. Up-ended earth crust, tortured 
precipices, surrounded us, and into the blue 
distance marched an army of snow-capped peaks, 
northward to the Arctic ice, southward to the 
Isthmus. 

Yet there are people who wonder why any one 
goes to the exertion of climbing a mountain. 

Presently we began the descent, and I learned 
anew the marvelous capacity of the Rocky ^foun- 
tains for contrasts. They can achieve a Miltonic 
epic and a tiny lyric by Father Tabb (does any one 
read Father Tabb any more?) in the same breath. 
They can smite you to awe with a precipice, and a 
moment later have you on your knees in admiration 



ON THE DIVIDE 29 

before a perfect little garden of jewel-like beauty, 
no larger than a platter. As we slid and skidded 
down the steep shale slope on the south side of our 
peak, a spot, you would say, about as hopeless bo- 
tanically as the earth could well offer, we were sud- 
denly in the midst of a colony of such gardens. Un- 
fortunately, we could not photograph them then, 
because of the high wind. But why not wait a day, 
and come back to them, armed, if necessary, with 
blankets or ponchos for windbreaks? That, in 
fact, is just what we did, and by so doing we made 
our base camp the more cherished in memory, too. 
To be always on your way over the high trails — or 
the low — is a great mistake. It is to bring into 
the leisure of the wilderness the rush of our urban 
life. When you find yourself in an attractive 
camp, with something interesting to do, or to look 
at, stay there till its full possibilities are exhausted. 
You will be amazed, perhaps, at how soon your 
tent, your camp fire, the spot in the brook where 
you wash, the dim trail you make to the stream for 
water, become home for you, with all the pleasant 
associations of an accustomed dwelling. Espe- 
cially at night do you return to it, with wet feet 
and tired body, as to the familiar shelter and com- 
fort. 

We rose early the next morning, before the sun 



30 SKYLINE CAMPS 

was up, shivering in the chill air, and got an early- 
start, ahead of the wind, back up the mountain. 
But early as we were, the wind was there first, 
awaiting us above timber — not, however, a gale 
as on the day before. With much effort and 
strategy we arranged for certain chosen gardens to 
sit quietly for their photographs, in the first rays 
of the sun that had risen now above the blue plains 
of Alberta and was peering down at us over the 
crest of the Divide. 

The basis of all these tiny gardens, hung eight 
thousand feet aloft on the southern face of a shale 
pyramid, was the same — a clump of moss campion. 
Sometimes the clump was two feet across, some- 
times much smaller; sometimes it was on top of a 
rock, like a patch of polypodys in our eastern 
woods, sometimes (and more often) cuddled down 
at the base of a rock for shelter. So brief is the 
season of flowers on these sub- Arctic heights — 
three months at most is spring, summer, and au- 
tumn — that most plants you find are in bud or 
bloom. The moss campion was always in bloom, its 
charming little pink flowers studding the rounded, 
soft pad of the mossy foliage like pins in a green 
cushion. By itself, a clump of this plant is de- 
lightful, as rock gardeners know. But the rare 
charm of these gardens resulted from the fact that 



ON THE DIVIDE 31 

the sturdy camxDion, once established, built up with 
its own humus, and with the powdered dust it 
caught from the air, a fertile and hospitable spot 
for other seeds to lodge in; and the green pin- 
cushions were not only studded with the pinks, but 
with the cerulean blue of forget-me-nots (the true 
forget-me-not in these mountains seems to favor 
the higher altitudes, leaving the valleys to the taller, 
false variety), with pale mauve Alpine vetch, 
and sometimes, for full measure, with a stalk or 
two of green lily {zygademus elegans), small, 
roundish, cream-white flowers, splashed with green, 
and many of them on a stem, or with a shooting 
star (dodocatheon pauciflorum), a strange, vivid 
little red flower shooting down its pointed yellow 
nose toward the earth, and most resembling in 
shape the blossom of our eastern deadly nightshade. 
None of these flowers, at this altitude, grew more 
than six or eight inches high; none of them was 
large or showy, but small, delicate, and vivid. 
Imagine them, drawn close together in the niche 
of friendly shelter made by some fragment of rock, 
compact in the little patch of soil built up by the 
moss-campion plant, blooming bravely and beau- 
tifully far up above the timber, around them the 
naked shale or the snowdrifts, just over them the 
ragged battlements of the Great Divide, far below 



32 SKYLINE CAMPS 

them the wooded canon and then the blue and white 
ramparts of mountains on the march! There is 
nothing, I think, quite like their charm. 

The passion for rock gardening is sometimes dif- 
ficult to understand, especially in view of the rock 
gardens men make for themselves, those piled-up 
heaps of stone which have the careless, impromptu 
air of the after-dinner speaker who has been fid- 
geting in his chair for an hour, " not expecting to 
be called on." But the passion is quite compre- 
hensible after you have seen a real rock garden, 
such a garden as grows on the upper battlements 
of the Continental Divide. It is not so easy to 
understand the average attempt at a rockery, in 
which there is always far too little rock and far too 
many — and generally too large — plants. Re- 
straint, delicacy, surprise, characterize nature's 
rock planting, just a drift of bloom here and there, 
lodged in a cranny. Then, too, as we discovered on 
our shale peak, the rocks themselves, in their nat- 
ural station, are tinged with storm-resisting lichens, 
and in tiny soil pockets everywhere minute stone 
crops grow, giving the sensation of a mere breath 
of verdure exhaled over the entire area, so faint it 
is scarcely discernible at a glance, but which is 
still felt as an essential of the charm. It is this, 
perhaps, which is most difficult to caj^ture in an 



ON THE DIVIDE 33 

artificial rockery, even if you have succeeded in 
propagating the Alpine plants. 

But for the present we will leave the rock gar- 
dens on their lonely slopes above the canon, pass 
over the afternoon which followed our climb, an 
afternoon spent in lazy idling around the camp, 
and rise ahead of the sun the following morning. 
While the rest were breaking camp, two of us went 
up to the higher pasture on Flat Top, to round up 
the horses, which had been out to grass for two 
days now, and were well rested and rotund. One 
of them was missing. We picked up his tracks 
in the trail leading north, over the ridge, and has- 
tily drove the others down to camp, saddled two of 
them, and rode back after the wanderer. 

The summit of Flat Top is just what its name 
implies. Now it was peppered with snowdriftts 
amid the little stands of stunted evergreens, and 
between the drifts grew grass of a brilliant emer- 
ald and hosts of golden dog-tooth violets. As we 
hurried along the trail, wondering if we would 
have to ride to Canada for our beast, or at any rate 
to the ranger station at Waterman Lake, suddenly 
our own horses began to snort with alarm, and then 
to rear on their hind legs, making frantic efforts to 
turn around and flee. Being but a green horse- 
man at best, my faculties were almost entirely con- 



34 SKYLINE CAMPS 

centrated on the task of keeping in the saddle and 
preventing my cayuse from bolting back down 
the trail. But at a shout from my more skilled 
companion, who Avas greatly enjoying himself, I 
managed to look ahead. There, across an open 
space not two hundred feet away, went a huge, 
lumbering grizzly, lumbering in aspect, but actu- 
ally traveling at an astonishing speed. He was out 
of sight in a stand of pines before I had fairly 
glimpsed him. 

" He was probably stalking our lost horse," said 
my companion. " You wait here." 

He spurred past me with that quick, level stride 
a western rider knows how to get out of a horse, 
and three minutes later returned, driving the wan- 
derer ahead of him. 

" Grazing a hundred yards up the trail," he 
said. " Mr. Silvertip was so curious about him, he 
didn't hear us coming." 

My own nag was still twitching and trembling 
from the encounter, and turned back with alacrity. 
But I found it hard to forgive him for keeping me 
so busy that I couldn't watch the bear run, with 
the attention he deserved. It isn't every day that 
you can watch a grizzly, in the full open, making 
a dash for cover. 

All that morning, after we had broken camp and 



ON THE DIVIDE 35 

packed our train, bidding good-bye reluctantly to 
our two-day home in the balsams, we toiled down 
the canon trail, with the sun getting hazier and 
hazier, and at last the clouds drifting in over the 
cliffs of the Divide. Before we reached the base 
of the trail up to Granite Chalet, it had begun to 
rain. We ate a hasty luncheon in the partial shel- 
ter of the forest, and, donning our slickers, began 
the climb. The rain increased steadily in volume 
as we ascended into the under fringes of the cloud, 
and the trail grew wetter and more slippery. In 
some places where the way was steep we had to 
dismount, and with comprehensible misgivings fol- 
low the instructions of the guide, to grab our 
horses by the tails and get what aid we could that 
way. But the poor horses seemed accustomed to 
this indignity, and failed to resent it. One could 
only be thankful they were not mules! 

This trail, which was not at that time a tourist 
thoroughfare but only a ranger's short cut, was so 
narrow that the dripping shrubs on either side 
whipped against us; it ran water now like a baby 
brook, and presently, as the cloud condensed around 
us and the cold increased, it grew slippery as glass 
with sleet. A sudden cry from a guide, a startled 
scream from the horse, and one of the pack animals 
went off and rolled over and over three times be- 



36 SKYLINE CAMPS 

fore he came to rest in a mass of huckleberry 
bushes thh'ty feet down the slope. His pack had 
burst open, and canned goods strewed the hillside. 
There was a delay in the chill dampness, while we 
got him back, and repacked. Then we resumed 
our march, numbed with cold, traveling now in a 
cloud of snow. 

At last we broke into the open spaces below the 
chalet, heralding timber line, splashed through a 
brook, and raised our eyes to see the low sun sud- 
denly breaking through the clouds over Heaven's 
Peak across the canon. A moment later, even as 
we toiled up the last few feet to shelter, this great 
sun shaft, like the penciled rays from a vast search- 
light, struck full on the cloud curtain which en- 
veloped the Divide, and a gigantic and perfect rain- 
bow swam into life, arching high over the half-seen 
battlements, and dropping down on the southern 
end into the forest at the base of the Garden Wall. 
The effect was so extraordinarily theatric, espe- 
cially as all the sunlight was pouring out of one hole 
in the west, and the snow was still swirling around 
us, that we were startled into forgetfulness of our 
miserable state, and remained outside the chalet till 
the colors faded and the hole in the western sky 
grew larger and made a rose-pink backdrop behind 
the Alpine cone of Heaven's Peak. 



ON THE DIVIDE 37 

That night a porcupine ate up a halter which 
one of the guides carelessly left outside. I was 
awakened early in the morning by the sound of his 
execution. Close to the chalet I cornered another 
one, and bj^ poking him with a rotten stick secured 
several quills. A deer circled the building, as we 
were packing up, wary and shy, but full of alert 
curiosity. His ears up, his big eyes fixed upon us, 
he remained for some time about two hundred and 
fifty yards away, finally bounding lightly up the 
rocks and disappearing around a headland. We 
took our time about packing, for the day's march 
was an easy one. The morning was clear and fine. 
Again we paused on the top of the pass, sketching 
and exploring and lying in the sun till after lunch- 
eon, and then we dropped raj)idly down to the 
Swiftcurrent valley and jogged along on the 
homeward way till we reached the last level mile or 
two. Then the cowboy guide, who was leading 
our little cavalcade, emitted a whoop, and his horse 
took wings. With disconcerting suddenness every 
other saddle horse in the party did likewise, tearing 
past the pack horses and settling down to a wild 
gallop of pursuit. I was carrying my camera in a 
pack on my back, and it began to pound my spinal 
column with rhythmic and painful thumps. . Hair- 
pins flew from the women's heads. Eastern faces 



38 SKYLINE CAMPS 

grew set and desperate. But our cayuses had 
heard the call, and there was no stopping them. 
Past the ranger's house we tore, over the bridge we 
clattered, and brought uj) short in front of the ho- 
tel, again with disconcerting suddenness. Your 
western pony has no mercy on his brakes. 

Presently the pack horses came sedately trot- 
ting in by themselves, and stood meek and de- 
jected, waiting to be unloaded. They had, we de- 
clared, a civilized look. We were back to civili- 
zation, in very fact. Five minutes later we all 
caught each other at the news stand, buying the 
daily paper. 



PIEGAN PINES AND GUNSIGHT PASS 




HE next stage of our journey might 
have been made in a day — the trip 
over Piegan Pass from Many Gla- 
cier to Going- to-the- Sun chalets, a 
distance of something better than 
twenty miles. But twenty miles of a mountain 
pass trail is a long day's hike, and you miss much 
for sheer plodding weariness. The only proper 
method is to travel till some particularly alluring 
spot invites, and then camp, to savor it at sunset, in 
starlight, and under the shafts of the rising sun. 
We had progressed but six or eight miles the first 
morning, when we reached our camping Eden. 
The way took us at first through woods starred with 
the bright yellow bloom of the arnica, and along an 
open bank by a lake where the pentstemon was pro- 
lific and the yellow columbines, and I saw growing 
in profusion a plant which is extremely rare in the 
east, the spring-blooming blue or purple clematis. 
(Our eastern variety is listed as clematis verticilla- 
ris, and the western as clematis columbiana, but the 
difference is not easily apparent to the eye. ) Both 

39 



40 SKYLINE CAMPS 

grow along the ground, occasionally climbing a few 
feet up some convenient shrub, and both bear soli- 
tary blue-to-purplish flowers, comx^osed of four 
pointed petals that hang down like a scalloped bell. 
I know of but two or three stations for this plant in 
my part of the world, the Berkshire Hills, and one 
of them, I rejoice to say, is on my own land, up the 
mountainside. It is, indeed, almost exclusively a 
mountain wild flower, I think, and one of our rar- 
est. But here, in the Rockies, the vines were riot- 
ing over the ground and climbing up the bushes 
with the profusion of a bittersweet tangle. It was 
difficult for the guides to understand my reluctance 
to move on. But it is difficult for a western guide 
to understand any enthusiasm over wild flowers. 
Their own ignorance of the mountain flora is more 
abysmal than are the canons. 

We had moved on past the clematis, and reached 
a charming open meadow by the shore of a glacier- 
green lake. Directly across this lake shot up a prec- 
ipice, threaded with white ribbons of falling water, 
and above it lay Grinnell Glacier. Behind and 
above the glacier, in turn, rose the last wall of the 
Divide. Just to the left of the lake the naked gray 
cliffs of Mount Gould reared upwards till they 
reached the slope of the mountain that tilts back to 
a long, sharj) ridge-j)ole. This roof was white with 



PIEGAN PINES 41 

the snow we had run into the day before. To the 
right, the slopes of Grinnell Mountain, while steep 
enough, still were able to support a carpet of scrub 
timber and bushes. We were in a delicate, green 
amphitheatre, walled with precipices. There was 
plentiful pasture for the horses, pure water in 
abundance, superb prospects for the lift of the eye, 
an army of inquisitive ground squirrels waiting a 
word of encouragement to join our feast — and a 
garden of wild flowers such as I had not before en- 
countered. It was not yet noon, but we made camp 
for the night ! 

It was a glorious afternoon we spent, scrambling 
up the side wall, through stubborn and tearing 
scrub, to photograph the glacier that hung on a 
ledge far above the lake, and then, when the breeze 
had died down with the dropping of the sun, trying 
to photograph the chalice cups that starred the 
grass of Grinnell Meadows, all about our camp. 
The chalice cup, or mountain anemone (anemone 
occidentalis), is perhaps the loveliest of all the 
Rocky Mountain wild flowers. At any rate, I 
thviught so that day, when it blossomed so pro- 
fusely around me, and had the field almost to itself. 
It sends up a flower stalk eight or ten inches from a 
cluster Oi very light, fuzzy leaves, the blossom it- 
self being two or even three inches across, cream- 



42 SKYLINE CAMPS 

white in color, with a prominent golden-gi-een cen- 
tre. After the flower has dropped, the stem 
pushes on, for another foot, and develops finally a 
fluffy seed ball, not unlike a huge dandelion, which 
itself is extremely decorative, nodding in masses 
over the grass. Here in the meadows we found 
the plants budded, in full perfection of bloom, and 
in their final state. No doubt the melting of the 
snow had much to do with this, the budded plants 
growing in a place where a drift had but recently 
disappeared. Later we were to come upon sharp, 
V-shaped ravines where, on the sides, the flowers 
grew in belts, only a few feet wide, each belt repre- 
senting a two- or three-week period under normal 
conditions, so that the flowers in the belt nearest to 
the bottom, where the snow had but just disap- 
peared, were the dog-tooth violets of May, while on 
the upper rim, in full bloom on the same day, was 
the goldenrod of August! When the snow melts 
late, it is astonishing how quickly the repressed 
plants spring up, grow, and come into flower. In 
the Cascades of Oregon, on a warm July day, I 
have seen a snowdrift disappear from the reddish- 
gray pumice, leaving it damp and naked as a sea 
beach, and by the next evening I have seen this 
same desert pricked all over with green lance tips 
bursting through. 



PIEGAN PINES 43 

At any rate, we saw the chalice cups from bud 
to seed pod, acres upon acres of them, and for once 
I regretted our remoteness from the raih'oad, which 
prevented me from shipping any young plants 
home. On a bank in my garden I have several 
plants of the Alpine anemone {anemone pulsatilla) , 
which is a strikingly similar flower, except that it is 
purple instead of white, and which sometimes is in 
full bloom above a powdering of belated April 
snow. If our eastern wild flower nurseries can 
propagate this foreign cousin, why cannot they 
propagate our own western anemone? It certainly 
grows on a variety of soils, for I have found it in 
profusion in the pure volcanic conglomerate above 
Crater Lake in Oregon, as well as in the lush 
meadows of the Rockies. For that matter, there 
are a host of western wild flowers, unknown in the 
East, that certainly deserve careful experiment. 
The tourist, however, seldom has any facilities for 
shipping out his specimen plants, and in my own 
case, could I have shipped them, there was nobody 
on the receiving end to give them proper care and 
set them in the most likely places. The work, of 
course, is one for the professional horticulturist, and 
it is strange that none seems whole-heartedly to have 
undertaken it. 

So we reflected as we lay on our stomachs, focus- 



44 SKYLINE CAMPS 

ing our cameras at chalice cups, like machine gun- 
ners in the grass, and catching in their solitary- 
images on the ground glass still more of their queen- 
like beauty. 

That evening our fire burned a hole of yellow 
radiance in the starlit darkness of the meadows, the 
shimmering lake lapped softly on its beach, the edge 
of the glacier and snow-covered roof of the over- 
hanging mountain were ghost-white and gleaming 
against the blue-black night sky, and through the 
stillness came from far off the soft thunder of fall- 
ing waters. Now and then a bell on one of the 
horses tinkled sweetly. 

" I love that sound," said our cowboy guide, who 
was not given to poetic reflections. 

We waited in some surprise, for the evident con- 
tinuation of his remark. 

" Yes," he added, " I love to wake up in the night 
and hear it. It means the old cayuse is still 
around, and I won't have to go chasing after him 
in the morning." 

The old cayuses were all around at sun-up, and 
after an extremely tentative and abruptly termi- 
nated attempt to bathe in the glacier-fed lake, and 
the complete demolition of a mountain of griddle 
cakes and a log cabin full of syrup, we struck camp 
and were off. 



PIEGAN PINES 45 

The trail from Grinnell Meadows up to Piegan 
Pass follows an interesting conformation. Instead 
of climbing the Divide, it parallels it, climbing 
steadily from the very base of Mount Gould to a 
point, at last, almost ten thousand feet up, crosses 
an eastern spur thrown off from the Divide, and 
drops down to St. Mary Lake, still on the eastern 
watershed. The ascent is thus made under the 
very shadow- of the Divide precipices, and it seems 
an endless climb in a naked wilderness of rock. 
Between the trail and the cliffs a stream comes 
down, leaping over Morning Eagle Falls, and a 
picture of those falls shows nothing at all but tum- 
bling water and stratified stone, layer after layer 
piled up for three thousand feet. The backward 
view grows ever wilder and more impressive, espe- 
cially the cliffs of Gould, which shoulder back ex- 
actly the way the new skyscrapers are erected in 
New York, each terrace capped with a little pin- 
nacle like an ornamental urn. I doubt if this cliff 
could be climbed, not only because of its pitch but 
also the treacherous nature of the rock. However, 
if some Dolomite fan is looking for practice in his 
own country, I cheerfully call his attention to this 
portion of the Continental Divide. 

There is scanty timber on the Piegan trail, and 
as the top of the pass is approached, you wind your 



46 SKYLINE CAMPS 

way over a desert of broken stone, with the Divide 
on your right and the ragged summit of JNIount 
Siyeh on your left, a desolate, Dantean prospect, 
where lost souls might well be wandering. It was, 
indeed, almost as a ghost that I suddenly encoun- 
tered a shrubby cinquefoil bush growing up here, 
more than eight thousand feet above the sea, above 
all timber, sheltered by a stone for six inches of its 
length, and then bent horizontal by the sheering 
gales, but bravely flowering. In fact, its yellow 
blossoms were larger and handsomer than those on 
the myriad bushes which have overrun my neglected 
sheep pasture in the Berkshires. I stopped beside 
this brave little bush, which refused to break, how- 
ever much it bowed to the temj^ests, and saluted it 
as a friend from home. The guide, I think, sus- 
pected the altitude had gone to my head. 

From the top of the pass we dropped two thou- 
sand feet or more down an interminable trail, cut 
on the traverse of a forty-five per cent, shale 
slide, a slide naked of all verdure, desolate as a 
Titanic slag heap. But at the bottom we hit a level 
stretch, with soil instead of stones beneath the 
horses' hoofs, and trotted into Paradise. 

The spot in which we found ourselves was one of 
those glacial cirques so characteristic of the Rockies, 
but with a lovely and ingratiating personality all 



PIEGAN PINES 47 

its own. It bears the fitting name of Piegan Pines. 
Imagine a horseshoe amphitheatre, perhaps half a 
mile across and about as deep, with a comparatively 
level floor and walls two or three thousand feet high, 
precipitous in places, in places (as the head wall 
down which we had descended) steep slopes of 
naked shale. Imagine snow-fields hung far up on 
these precipices, and slender ribbons of waterfalls 
descending from them, so slender and silken, so 
softly falling, that they suggest the hair of Meli- 
sande, grown white with peace. Imagine these 
waterfalls after they reach the valley floor, running 
across the lush emerald grass in little, clear, icy 
brooks. Imagine on the banks of these brooks and 
everywhere through the grass thousands upon thou- 
sands of dog-tooth violets, a foot tall, shaking their 
golden lily bells in the breeze. Imagine, too, a 
scattered host of limber pines, bursting with tiny 
pink cones like flowers — small, twisted, picturesque 
trees from a Japanese screen. Imagine all this, and 
then lift your eyes to the open end of the horse- 
shoe, and see first the land plunge abruptly into a 
bottomless hole, and across the hole, the sudden, 
stunning leap of Mount Jackson, ten thousand feet 
into the air, all blue and dazzling white, and bear- 
ing on an eastward shoulder the great snow-field of 
Blackfeet Glacier, which it passes on to the infinite 



48 SKYLINE CAMPS 

procession of southward-marching summits. Im- 
agine it if you can. But I fear you cannot, for the 
peculiar fusion of the most delicate beauties with the 
imi3act of tremendousness, so strikingly character- 
istic of the Rocky Mountains, is never quite grasped 
until it is actually experienced ; and at Piegan Pines 
this fusion is at its perfection. 

We built a noonday fire beside an ice-water rill, 
with dog-tooth violets for a centerpiece on our green 
table, and a storm-twisted limber pine for our roof, 
if we cared to draw back into the shade. It was 
such a withdrawal that disclosed to one of us a pe- 
culiar charm of the spot. By moving about among 
the pines it was j)ossible to vary the landscapes al- 
most infinitely, each new picture framed between 
two trunks, or under a twisted, pink-coned limb. 
You could get a picture of rolling grass, nodding 
violets and crj^stal water on the run — just the deli- 
cate, intimate foreground. Or you could get a 
picture of this delicate foreground at the feet of a 
naked precipice. Or you could glimpse just the 
top of a precipice through a piney hole. Or you 
could frame a great blue-and-white mountain, miles 
away, between two reddish-brown trunks. And 
each picture seemed more lovelj^ than the last. 

Why should any one, we said, leave such a spot? 
Except, we answered, in the hope of finding others 



PIEGAN PINES 49 

yet more alluring. Two of us, indeed, did not 
leave it till long after the others had departed down 
the trail. Their going left a profound silence, out 
of which gradually came many voices, mountain 
voices speaking to us — the far, soft thunder of wa- 
terfalls, a white-ci-owned sparrow close at hand, the 
sea-shell murmur of wind in the pines, the lush 
ripple of the brooks over the grass, the crack of a 
stick in our fire. As the sun sank down the west, 
the shadow of the western wall crept out across the 
amphitheatre, touched us with its chill as with a 
finger, and crept up the precipices to the east. In 
the distance Mount Jackson's snow-fields had al- 
ready begun to blush with amethyst and its shad- 
owed face to turn from cerulean blue to gun-metal, 
before we noticed that the hole into which we must 
descend was already filling up with twilight, as 
water fills a well. We doused our little fire with 
wistful regret, and put our horses down the trail. 
It was fortunate for us, perhaps, that there was 
but one trail, because in the heavy forests below 
darkness had come long before we reached the 
bottom, and saw the gleam of water from St. Mary 
Lake that told us camp could not be far off. 

The northern twilights, however, are as long 
about waning into night as Tristan is about dying 
in the opera. Once we had reached the open path 



50 SKYLINE CAMPS 

beside the lake, we could see its cool, deep waters, 
and all the tall array of peaks that stand at guard 
around it, with old Red Eagie still bearing on his 
summit snows the blush of sunset. A noble and a 
lovely lake, St. Mary, and may the Virgin herself 
bless the French mission priest who, long ago, gave 
it so beautiful a name that no future trapper or 
surveyor quite was able to have it rechristened Lake 
McSweeny or Lake Bill Johnson. Neither have 
they who attempt to snatch immortality by affixing 
their miserable patronymics to a magnificent ex- 
ample of God's handiwork, been able to take the 
name from the noblest mountain which guards St. 
Mary Lake, Going-to-the-Sun, named they say by 
those true poets, the Indians, when their friend the 
missionary went westward, up the lake and over the 
pass. A great pink pyramid seen from the lake 
base on the east, with smooth, steep slopes, it is 
almost monumental in its perfection of line. It 
dominates the lake and the eastward-lying prairie, 
and it superbly sentinels the range behind. We 
camped that night by the lapping water at its feet. 
To reach Gunsight Pass you climb a few easy 
miles from the head of St. Mary Lake to another 
one of those three walled amphitheatres hollowed 
into the Divide, which apparently block your way 
with a precipice. This one is cut into the north- 



PIEGAN PINES 51 

east side of Mount Jackson, and is largely occupied 
by Gunsight Lake, but not quite. There is, at the 
lower end of the pond, a park of several hundred 
acres, and Avhen we came into this park I pulled 
up my horse, and, without leaving the saddle, 
counted thirty varieties of wild flowers in bloom. 
The grass, indeed, was so thick with them that green 
was hardly the predominant color; a multi-colored 
and infinitely delicate carpet sweeping up to meet 
the multi-colored rocks above. One flower, how- 
ever, predominated, the so-called Indian basket 
grass, or squaw grass {xero'phyllum tenacc) , a mem- 
ber of the yucca family, growing here in such pro- 
fusion that its white bloom-stalks, in long borders by 
the bits of wood, were like the white plumes of 
armies on the march, and the air was heavy with 
their sweet scent. 

The flowers grow on a single thick stalk, from 
two to four feet tall, out of a clump of wiry, grass- 
like leaves. These blooms are cream white, and 
clustered thickly around the end of the stalk, a little 
after the manner of a red-hot poker plant. Some- 
times the cluster is conical in shape, more often it is 
shaped like an inverted pear. It is stately, decora- 
tive, and striking, with a sweet and not too excessive 
odor. It is abundant, also, in parts of the Cascade 
Mountains in Oregon and Washington (always, 



52 SKYLINE CAMPS 

when I have found it there, growing on the west, or 
moist side of the Divide) , and I am told it has been 
naturalized in the mountains of North Carolina. 
Whether any attempt has been made to grow it in 
our northeastern states, I cannot say. But I am 
sure the first person who does succeed in growing 
it will have many pilgrims to his field. 

When we reached this park at the foot of Gun- 
sight Lake, and looked up at the great, down- 
pitching snowdrifts on the side of Jackson, which 
we had got to traverse, horses and all, to reach the 
pass (normally the snow would have been melted 
at this season, which was late July), there seemed 
no good reason why we should go any farther that 
day, and at least three reasons why we shouldn't — 
the basket grass and two hermit thrushes. Dad 
speedily evolved a fourth. If we camped there, 
he'd have time to bake a pie. ( It turned out to be 
a prune pie, but we forgave him in the course of 
time.) So there we camped, filling our cases with 
flowers, climbing up to Blackfeet Glacier in the 
vain hope of finding the snow melted enough to 
open the crevasses, and, as twilight stole on, watch- 
ing the great purple shadows creep along the but- 
tresses of Citadel and Going-to-the-Sun, which 
from this westward view was no longer a pyramid 
but a strange Aztec cathedral with a little turret on 




Gunsight Peak from Gunsight Pass 



PIEGAN PINES 53 

top. The two hermits sang for us, even as they 
sing on my mountainside at home, and with their 
song was the less familiar one of the white-crowned 
sparrow. The night, however, settled down cold 
about us, with a chill breath as if from the glacier 
above. We huddled around our camp fire in the 
starlit dark, and crawled gladly in between all the 
blankets our packs could supply. 

The trip over Gunsight Pass to Lake Macdonald 
is a leisurely day's pull, when the start is made from 
Gunsight Lake. You begin immediately to ascend, 
zigzagging up the steep and naked side of Mount 
Jackson. That morning, as we drew up level with 
the top of the head wall, we came at length to the 
huge snowdrift which cut across the trail. It was 
perhaps two hundred yards wide, and starting five 
hundred feet above us, swept down at an angle of 
forty-five degi'ces or better, straight and smooth as 
the white roof of a house, dropped five hundred feet 
below us — and ended in nothing! It ended, of 
course, at the top of a precipice, but it seemed to 
drop into the air. To a climber, with spiked shoes 
and an Alpine stock, traversing such a slope is 
simple enough. But when you are dressed for rid- 
ing, and have to lead your horse, it is quite a differ- 
ent matter. A slip is the direct route to kingdom 
come. No one had been permitted over the pass 



54 SKYLINE CAMPS 

that season, because of this drift, but the rangers 
had gone up ahead of us that morning and shoveled 
a trail across, by notching into the snow and mak- 
ing a level path two feet wide. Across this we led 
our horses, some of them extremely loath to make 
the venture, too. A few hundred feet beyond we 
rounded a turn on the trail, and came into Gunsight 
Pass. 

You are in it before you realize why it got its 
name. It is a notch on the Divide between the wall 
of Jackson and a sharp cone of rock which from the 
pass exactly resembles a gigantic gunsight, even in 
color. The j)ass itself is but a few rods wide, and 
hardly ten steps long, for the Divide here is only 
a razor back. Behind you the precipice falls 
abruptly away into the hole that holds Gunsight 
Lake, and in front of you, as you move westward, 
suddenly the new landscape bursts on your sight; 
you achieve, for once, the goal of dreams, — you see 
the land beyond the mountains, and find it won- 
drous fair. 

Just over the spine is a tortured tree, which has 
struggled up as the last outpost of the timber, and 
held its own for centuries — or so it looks — against 
the vicious sniping of the storms. It is twisted to 
a spiral; its eastern side is branchless and scored 
almost clean of bark, the exposed wood being 



PIEGAN PINES 55 

scoured to a jDolish by the wind-driven particles of 
rocky grit. Its few branches that hold out apj)eal- 
ing arms toward the milder southwest are withered 
and scant. But it still lives, heroic and alone. 
And beneath it the trail drops down eight hundred 
feet to the bottom of a symmetrical glacial cirque, 
ground out of the red walls of Mount Jackson, and 
holding in its center an oval lake of the most mar- 
velous green. Beyond that lake the land falls sud- 
denly away again into a forest-filled canon, and be- 
yond that, far away, the haze-hung plains, and then, 
fold upon fold, the lower blue mountains huddle into 
the west. Lazy cumulous clouds were drifting high 
overhead as we paused to gaze on Lake Ellen Wil- 
son — yes, that, alas! is its name — and when their 
shadows crossed the water they strangely turned 
the emerald green to opalescent lilac. 

Even lunch beside a bush of magenta heather, and 
a chance to watch two Clark's crows, — splendid, 
noisy, humorous black-and-white birds, — teaching 
their young to manoeuvre out over the brink of a 
precipice, and a half-mile border of twin flowers 
beside the trail, and finally the passage through the 
mid-afternoon mournful twilight of a ghostly cedar 
forest, were lesser pleasures of that day. My 
thoughts kept going back to that tree above the 
timber line, and to the jeweled lake beneath it. So, 



56 SKYLINE CAMPS 

that evening, pushing out from shore in a canoe on 
Lake Macdonald, with the northern twilight still 
bright over the water and the snow-clad peaks 
withdrawn and aloof, as if they were averting their 
faces to commune with the departed sun, I gave 
way to the mastering impulse of my tribe, and com- 
mitted poetry. These are the poems I wrote, for 
it is an even more mastering impulse of my tribe 
to inflict on others the result of our rhapsodies: 



TIMBER LINE 

The tortured trees of timber line, i 

So small, so old, i 

So twisted by the wind, ' 

So bent and racked and beaten to the ground, 

Yet so alive and fighting to the end. 

Are like those prophets of the world's advance, 

Who face the storm-sleet 

Of the scorn of men, 

Grow old and hard i 

And bare with buffets on the breast, | 

To die at last , 

High on the uplands with their dream! ' 



PIEGAN PINES 57 



LAKE ELLEN WILSON 

An oval mile of emerald 
Set in a cirque of vast, fantastic rocks ; 
Above, the snow-fields climbing to the sky, 
Below, far off, the blue, mysterious plains; 
A little wind has made the water crawl ; 
A little cloud, a white balloon 
That trails its anchor down the slope, 
Has swept that shadow out across the lake, 
And, lo! 
The emerald is an amethyst. 



WILD STRAWBERRIES 




T was a hot day. Our train for the 
east didn't arrive till after dinner 
that night, and the prospect of loaf- 
ing for twelve hours in the Glacier 
Park Hotel was depressing. To be 
sure, we could spend a considerable portion of that 
time in answering the accumulated mail of the past 
month — but we had no intention of doing so. It 
had waited four weeks — let it wait another. In- 
stead, we scared up some horses and jogged 
leisurely over the trail to Two Medicine Lake — 
over the road, rather, for the motors use it. A 
fascinating eight miles, the first five over the roll 
and swells of the prairie, the remainder past Lower 
Two Medicine, and up the gorge, a wide and smil- 
ing one, to the larger lake, which crinkles its green 
water and laps the beach at the very feet of Rising 
Wolf Mountain, a noble red pile as rough-hewn as 
a buffalo. The prairie was at its best that morning, 
under a brilliant blue sky, with all its myriad flower 
heads bowing to a steady breeze. The track of the 

58 



WILD STRAAVBERRIES 59 

road was a gravel-gray ribbon edged with white and 
gold, for perpetually beside it marched a double 
border of yarrow, pricked with patches of tall false 
dandelions. Those dandelions which had gone to 
seed but added to the edging of white. Away from 
the road in every direction the long, smooth, doming 
ground swells of the prairie were as brightly colored 
as a tapestry. Now and then, in New England, you 
may see a long-neglected field of mowing in the late 
summer almost as gay, when the goldenrod, the 
asters, the Queen Anne's lace have run the grass 
practically out. But it will be only a field, and then 
woods or pastures or a fence will intervene. But 
here nothing intervened. The bright tapestry rose 
and dipped and rose again as far as you could see, 
acre upon acre of flowers, with the lavender of the 
bergamots giving it, just then, a basic color — or was 
it the yellow of the gallardias? It was hard to 
say. 

Coming to an elevation of a hundred feet or more, 
where our trail branched from the highway and 
turned up the Two Medicine valley, we faced the 
main range of the Rockies, shooting up directly out 
of this bright prairie sea, every foot of them distinct 
from base to summit, and old Rising Wolf, still 
with the snow on his shaggy shoulders, close enough 
almost to cast his shadow over us. A single telephone 



60 SKYLINE CAMPS 

wire was strung on low poles beside the trail, and 
several sparrow hawks were coursing the prairie, 
and coming frequently to rest on this convenient 
perch, as they do in the crowded East. The strong 
breeze, drawing down the valley from the snow- 
fields and the lake, was suddenly cool, with a pe- 
culiar fragrance, subtle and hard to define — the 
odor of high mountains whereon the snow is melt- 
ing. We cantered more briskly up the trail to the 
Two Medicine chalets, on the lower end of the 
wind-crinkled water. Rising Wolf was now to our 
right, and ahead of us, sentineling the lake, and 
splitting into two forks the canon leading to the 
leap of the Divide precipice, one of those character- 
istic sharp pyramids so common in the Rockies. 
Leaving our horses, we shouldered a pack or two of 
grub, and made our way on foot up the lakeside, 
cutting into a dense tangle of low forest and 
swampy brush. 

In the shelter of the woods, out of the wind, it 
was hot, not a humid, unpleasant heat, but a dry, 
baking heat which left all your perceptions as acute 
as ever. As we approached what seemed, from the 
light through the trees, to be a clearing, I was 
vaguely aware of something strangely familiar. At 
first I could not even place the nature of the im- 
pression, but as we broke out into the edge of the 



WILD STRAWBERRIES 61 

clearing, a small meadow drowsy with the hot noon- 
day sun, I knew it came to me through my nose. I 
sniffed hard, still without capturing the elusive 
suggestion, and then we started across the clearing. 
Somebody ahead of me bruised something in the 
grass with his foot — and then I knew! In that 
still, hot little meadow, ringed with spired ever- 
greens and gay with wild flowers, the smell of wild 
strawberries spread suddenly on the air. There 
is no other odor quite like it, and somehow it is 
always associated in one's memory with hot, still 
meadows or pastures, with a blue sky and a clean 
air. I stopped abruptly, looking down into the 
grass and flowers at my feet just to see the straw- 
berries, and then up to see the great red dome of 
Rising Wolf above the tree-tops. It was August. 
At home the wild strawberries would be gone. I 
knew then what it was I had missed out of my 
summer — the smell of wild strawberries on the 
mountain air; of wild strawberries reddening the 
sparse grass of the High Farm pastures through 
which you pass to reach the cave where Hawthorne 
and Herman Melville once took refuge from a 
thunderstorm (and talked, probably, of how long it 
would be before the sun came out) ; of wild straw- 
berries thick in the grass of my own pastures, rising 
up the slopes to the mountain forest ; of wild straw- 



62 SKYLINE CAMPS 

berries gathered by stained fingers into pails and 
made into the most ambrosial jam this poor world 
knows ; of wild strawberries in a mossy turf on the 
edge of a meadow close to the white-pine woods, 
where their delectable odor mixes with the resinous 
fragrance of the pines as the hot July sun bakes 
them, and tAvo miles away my own mountain domes 
against a blue sky, even as Rising Wolf was doming 
here. 

I sat down plump in the middle of the little 
meadow, and began to eat wild strawberries as if 
my life depended on it. It was the first and only 
time I was ever homesick in the western mountains. 

The rest, who didn't wish " to spoil their lunch- 
eon " (fancy being able to pick enough wild straw- 
berries to have any appreciable effect on a healthy 
appetite!), went on across the clearing, and left me 
to follow when I would. I found them presently 
on the narrow beach of the lake, with a merry fire 
burning eagerly in a wind which came down from 
the snoAv-fields on Rising Wolf and was further 
cooled by crossing the water, chasing little white- 
capped waves up to our feet so that we lunched to 
the pleasant pounding of a miniature surf. It was 
our last camp fire for the summer, our farewell to 
the Rockies, and we lingered over it long after its 
actual service was performed, dousing it reluctantly 



WILD STRAWBERRIES 63 

with water from the baby breakers when at last we 
had to leave. 

The odor of wild strawberries was less pungent 
in the clearing when we crossed it once more, or so 
it seemed to me, perhaps because we entered with 
the wind, perhaps because the sun was lower, 
perhaps because my mood had passed. We trotted 
back to the railroad, through the rolling acres of 
prairie color, and sat down to dinner in a great 
hotel, clad in the garments of respectability. It 
was dark when the night express came thundering 
in, like a fiery serpent emerging from the black 
pass. Over the peaks of the mountains, however, 
the sky was still light, and the snow-fields were 
luminous as if they were composed of white phos- 
phorus. The cool night wind drew steadily down 
from those high places, and we felt it to the last — 
felt it on our cheeks and in our nostrils, until we 
entered the cars, and suddenly were engulfed in 
their stale, sickening odor. I got to bed as soon 
as possible, and dreamed of wild strawberries. 



II 

Lake Chelan 



LAKE CHELAN 




EFORE I went to Lake Chelan, I 
had never even heard of it, which no 
doubt proves my lack of acquaint- 
ance with the map of Washington, 
on which it occupies no inconspicuous 
place, as any body of water must which is more than 
fifty miles long. That was several years ago, yet 
even to-day I meet few people who do not greet the 
name with a query, " And where is Lake Chelan? " 
The East is still but little acquainted with the Cas- 
cade Mountains, excepting, of course. Mount 
Rainier, and even less acquainted, perhaps, with 
the inaccessible Olympics. Yet in the Cascades 
are probably the two most difficult Alpine or snow 
climbs in the United States, and the two most extra- 
ordinary and beautiful lakes. Washington has the 
most difficult climb — the north wall of Mount 
Baker, and the second most beautiful lake, Chelan. 
Oregon has the most beautiful and wonderful body 
of water. Crater Lake, and the second most difficult 
climb, Mount Jefferson. So honors are even, and 

67 



68 SKYLINE CAMPS 

that is well, as you will agree if you are acquainted 
with the inhabitants of those two states. 

To reach Lake Chelan we left the main line of 
the Great Northern at Wenatchee, a town perched 
on the steep bank of the Columbia River and dedi- 
cated to the production of apples and cherries. It 
was, indeed, cherry time when we arrived, a fact 
which considerably delayed our departure. Opin- 
ions differ regarding the merits of Oregon and 
Washington apples, though the quality is undoubt- 
edly improving under experimentation. But the 
Bing cherry admits of no dispute. It is essentially 
a product of the Northwest, and apparently doesn't 
thrive elsewhere. But the deep, volcanic soil, the 
equable climate, and the irrigation-controlled 
moisture, seem peculiarly to favor all the varieties 
of cherries which are grown there. They attain a 
size, a firmness, a bloom, and a flavor, which alone 
would have justified all Whitman's exertions on 
that famous ride. 

The Columbia comes down to Wenatchee from 
the north, on the easterly side of the Cascade 
barrier, which is visible from the heights above the 
town. The main line of the railroad follows up the 
confluent Wenatchee River, to find a way through 
the mountains; but a branch line follows the 
Columbia northward, and it is this branch you take 



LAKE CHELAN 69 

to reach Lake Chelan, getting off at Chelan Falls, 
where the station sits close to the edge of the softly 
hissing great green stream, and the bank rises 
steeply up for several hundred feet, shutting you 
into a canon. Out of this canon a dusty road rises 
by a series of switchbacks — a road unprotected by 
fence or wall, cut into the face of the bank. It 
brings you up on a level shelf, bounded by green 
hills and fertile with new orchards; and you cross 
this shelf for two or three miles, to reach a little 
town on the shore of a green lake, a lake perhaps 
five miles long, ending against the doming green 
hills. Here we transferred our luggage to a motor 
boat that seemed ridiculously seaworthy and power- 
ful for so small a body of water, and chug-chugged 
our way northwestward, up the lake. Out on the 
water, we could see the green checkerboards of the 
new orchards sloping everywhere down to the shore 
line, and the new " ranch " houses springing up 
among them, for this was boom country, but newly 
opened to the fruit growers. In the crystal-clear, 
dry air we could plainly see a man hoeing between 
the rows of new trees, like little green polka dots, 
and we could even catch the quicksilver flash of the 
irrigation stream as it followed his hoe. As we 
moved on across the green water, which gave one a 
curious sensation of great depth, we began to notice 



70 SKYLINE CAMPS 

that two of the doming hills at the upper end of the 
lake did not meet, but were a gateway through which 
the lake went on into unseen regions. Soon we were 
passing through this gateway, and saw that the lake 
extended yet another five miles, and entered a 
second gateway, composed of two headlands higher 
and more rugged than the first. The lake was per- 
haps three miles wide, and strongly suggested a 
larger and wilder Hudson River, where it passes 
between Storm King and the Point. 

Through the second gateway we moved on the 
deep green water, and lo ! five miles ahead of us was 
a third, between headlands still higher, still more 
rugged and precipitous, looking at last like genuine 
mountains. The lake, however, grew no wider, 
though it grew rougher, as a wind came sucking- 
down it. We began to realize it as a long, narrow 
fiord winding into the heart of the range. All 
signs of orchards, or indeed of habitation, soon 
ceased along its banks. Those banks became great 
down-sloping cliffs of dark basaltic rock, hung with 
ferns and firs on the ledges, and draped with water- 
falls. They offered no chance at all for farm or 
dwelling. Higher and higher they rose, and more 
and more precipitous, till they shot sheer out of the 
water at the base, gradually stepping back in for- 
ested terraces to their mountain summits three, four. 



LAKE CHELAN 71 

five, six thousand feet above the lake. In places 
there was absolutely no beach at all. The skipper 
took the boat close in, and we could see the precipice 
plunge down out of sight into the green depths. 
The Mawretania could lay up alongside and throw 
out a gangplank to some ledge where a fir tree 
perched, or a garden of paintbrush and lupine 
painted the face of the rock. The lake is about 
sixteen hundred feet dee^), which brings its bottom 
well below sea level, and if it were emiJtied of water, 
the hole at the upper end, where the mountain walls 
are highest, would be from one to three thousand 
feet deeper than the Grand Canon of the Colorado. 

But there seemed to be no upper end. Being so 
narrow, Lake Chelan has only to curve the least 
degree around a headland to shut out the view, and 
we passed through wild gateway after wild gate- 
way, the last formed by peaks eight thousand feet 
high, before we came at last, more than fifty miles 
from our starting point, into the final stretch of 
water that led to a pier, a small hotel, and a cove of 
forest huddled at the feet of overhanging snow-clad 
summits. We had come by water into the very 
heart of the high Cascades. I think there is no 
other such approach to mountains in the United 
States. 

Life at the little hotel had much of the democracy 



72 SKYLINE CAMPS 

of camping about it. The proprietor was just 
coming in from the Stehekin River, which rushed 
down from the snow-fields into the lake immediately 
behind the strawberry patch, with a string of three- 
pound trout in his hand. 

" How were they biting? " somebody asked him, 
a foolish question in face of the evidence. 

*' I had to hide behind a tree to bait my hook," he 
answered. 

At dinner we chanced to talk about the theory 
that goitre can result from an excessive drinking 
of snow water. Our waitress was an interested 
listener, and at last she could contain herself no 
longer, for pride. 

" I got a goitre! " she beamed. 

Of course we christened her Queenie, in honor 
of the sister of Herman and Verman, whom Pen- 
rod and Sam so admired because of a similar pos- 
session. After supper Queenie was one of the 
belles of the ball, held in the hotel lobby with a 
phonograph for orchestra. The proprietor had put 
on a coat for the occasion, but soon removed it 
again. And outside, in the northern twilight, the 
lake lay in deep, night shadow, beneath the beetling 
cliffs, while six thousand feet aloft the sentinel sum- 
mits were still bright with the departed day. 

Lake Chelan lies in a national forest, and there 



LAKE CHELAN 73 

are many ranger trails to ride, but unfortunately 
we were " doing " the lake as a side trip, and our 
time was limited. We could choose but one, and 
that one must not take us far afield. So, when 
morning came, we chose the trail up War Creek 
Pass, which leads over the northern wall, at the head 
of the lake, climbing to an altitude of nearly eight 
thousand feet. The ascent began, of course, almost 
immediately, but there was a brief half mile through 
heavy woods along the lake shore, and here I saw 
my first foxgloves growing wild — saw them, I con- 
fess, with bitter envy. 

How we, in the East, toil to achieve foxgloves! 
Tender biennials, we grow hundreds of little plants, 
and then try every known device to winter them for 
the next season's blooming. I have planted them in 
the currant bushes; I have planted them in cold 
frames; I have covered them with straw, with pine 
boughs, with dead leaves; I have left them uncov- 
ered. I have prayed for them — and cursed them. 
And sometimes they live through, and sometimes 
they don't. Never do all of them survive, and often 
none of them survives. But here, in an open glade 
by Lake Chelan, surrounded by great fir and cedar 
trees, and under the very shadow of the snow- 
capped peaks, were dozens and dozens of foxgloves, 
growing without any care, wild flowers like weeds, 



74 SKYLINE CAMPS 

and almost as tall as a man, magnificent great spikes 
of pure white, and of white mottled with pink. 
There wasn't a magenta flower in the whole garden! 
I have always said our eastern showy lady's-slipper 
{cypripedium spectabile) is the queen of wild flow- 
ers, but a stately white foxglove plant in a glade of 
the forest by Lake Chelan is certainly a dangerous 
rival. 

The trail now began to ascend, always steeply, by 
longer or shorter switchbacks, sometimes over open 
slopes and ledges of volcanic soil, sometimes through 
forest. At first the way was bordered with flower- 
ing shrubs in great profusion, the most conspicuous 
being the capberry, a large bush with copious blos- 
soms not unlike small white wild roses, and the showy 
goat's-beard, with its spirea-like white plumes. 
As the trail began to come out on dizzy ledges far 
above the water, however, the slopes of powdery 
volcanic ash grew still steeper, the shrubs disap- 
peared, and in their place was a great profusion of 
lower wild flowers — bright orange paintbrush, blue 
lupine, blue larkspur, in places carpeting the ground 
almost to the exclusion of the sparse grass, and 
wandering among the great brown boles of the for- 
est trees in bands and threads of color. The trees 
themselves, for the most part Douglas firs, with a 
sprinkling of cedars and now and then a deciduous 



LAKE CHELAN 75 

variety, did not grow in dense stands. Each tree, 
two or three feet in diameter and rising straight up 
for fifty feet without a hmb, seemed to preempt a 
certain space for itself, giving to the forested ledges 
a curious and beautiful park-like aspect. Brown 
tree boles like temple columns, bright orange and 
blue carpets of flowers, and between the columns 
and over the flowers, the eye roving to glimpse the 
green water far below, and across the water the 
great eight-thousand-foot leap of Castle Rock, and 
beyond that the eternal snow-fields: here are hang- 
ing gardens, indeed. 

Above these gardens we very soon came to the 
lower edge of the drifts. These drifts came down 
like long white fingers into the diminishing forest, 
and they were melting back rapidly, the wild flowers 
following them, so that dog-tooth violets would 
sometimes be in full bloom not six feet from a wall 
of snow. At six thousand feet the evergreens still 
held on, and while they were stunted, they were not 
perceptibly storm-scarred. In the next thousand 
feet, however, they rapidly gave way to small hard- 
woods, a curious little forest of gray trunks, half of 
them dead and either fallen or leaning on their 
neighbors, ghostlike against the gray, volcanic rocks. 
Before the final pull up to the col which is the sum- 
mit of the pass, a mere depression between two 



76 SKYLINE CAMPS 

naked stone heaps, and well over seven thousand 
feet above sea level, the trees ceased enth'ely, leav- 
ing the ridge desolate and wild — fit preparation for 
the prospect that greets you when you reach the top. 

What a world! All across the western sky, 
sweeping northward as far as the eye can see, sweep- 
ing southward so near you can almost touch them, 
and then bending to the east, advancing upon you 
like the tossed and stormy crest of some gigantic 
wave, are the Cascade Mountains, white-capped 
with snow, foam-furrowed with glaciers, and deep 
in their hollows dark with forests. Away in the 
northwest, blue and cloud-white, almost hanging in 
the air, is Mount Baker. Behind you, and six 
thousand feet almost directly below you, is the 
opalescent green water of Lake Chelan, with 
Castle Rock shooting up on the farther side, and 
not far to the left, and seeming but a few miles 
away, the splendid cone of Glacier Peak, with its 
white glacier spreading long tentacles down its 
sides, as if some strange octopus of ice had perched 
upon the summit. 

I looked long and wistfully at this mountain, 
realizing that with a few more days to spare we 
could have ridden the trail around to its base, and 
tackled one of those long ice arms leading to its 
summit mysteries of frozen silence. 



LAKE CHELAN 77 

We made our camj) at almost six thousand feet, 
near the lower end of a melting drift that ran 
crystal-cold water over the ground and fed the roots 
of the violets. And we thought of Queenie as we 
drank. Our tents were strung between the boles of 
sheltering fir trees, and we saw, between the brown 
trunks, the cloud shadows trail over the green water 
far below, flushing it to amethyst; we saw the sun 
sink behind the snow-clad pyramids of the Cascade 
Divide, and the rosy blush linger on the white cap 
of Glacier Peak. Then we saw night fill up the 
vast hole where the lake lay bosomed, and we felt 
the cold come down from the naked col above us. 
In the hotel, far below, the guests could then see 
our camp fire leap up anew, like a star that was 
caught on the mountain. 



Ill 

Interlude 
On the Hills of Home 



ON THE HILLS OF HOME— THE 
APPALACHIAN TRAIL 




LITTLE friend of mine who came 
back to the Berkshires after a trip 
through the Rockies, and remarked, 
" Father, this is practically a 
prairie," expressed the feeling all of 
us have when we first return to our tamer environ- 
ment, from the big places. How well I remember, 
as a small boy, thrilling to a sharp escarpment of 
rock which rose near the railroad track on the way 
from my home to Boston — I think it was in a place 
called Middlesex Fells. My regret was that this 
rock face wasn't in my own town, so I could climb its 
thrilling inclination. Then, one summer, we went 
to the White Mountains. On our return, I looked 
for my rock face as the train passed by. To my 
amazement, I could hardly detect it. It had shrunk 
to insignificance! Not until almost Christmas time 
had my memory of Tuckerman's Ravine sufficiently 
faded for that little cliff in Middlesex Fells to re- 
assume its rightful proportions. It is difficult, 
whatever our age, to prevent this sort of shrinkage 

81 



82 SKYLINE CAMPS 

at home, when we return from abroad. Yet we 
should, I think, take thought to prevent it, because 
it seems to be unfortunately true that the people 
who, as a class, will make the effort to preserve and 
develop our native wilderness, are the people who 
have loved and tramped the larger wildernesses. 
The stay-at-home is seldom actively appreciative of 
his environment. Somebody else has to impart the 
impulse to him. So never undervalue your back 
yard boulder! 

I live under the shadow of Mount Everett, the 
second-highest mountain in Massachusetts. It is a 
noble, dome-shaped summit, rising from a ten-mile- 
long rampart, with steep shoulders dropping pre- 
cipitously down to the Housatonic plain. My own 
forests go up its side to the 2,000 foot level, and the 
summit rises 600 feet above that level, and a mile 
or so back across an upland scrub forest. To north 
and south, for ten miles, along this percipitous east- 
ern wall of the buttress are many ravines, one, at 
least, clothed with virgin hemlock, and musical with 
falling water. In a season of comfortable precipi- 
tation, there are no less than four groups of tum- 
bling waterfalls along this mountainside, and in 
three of them the water lasts through a drought. 
There is also a spur of the mountain which juts 
sharply out to the east, with a precipitous rock face 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 83 

on the southern side, known as Black Rock. In the 
crevices of this rock face, and if the day is warm 
on its ledges, live rattlesnakes, a thriving colony of 
them which persistent annual hunting by Dr. Dit- 
mars of the Bronx Zoo, and by local snake admirers, 
has failed to exterminate, or even, seemingly, to 
diminish. The face of Black Rock, and the ravines 
down which the brooks tumble, are extremely steep, 
in places so precipitous that I often take a rope 
along when some party of guests on a picnic want 
to climb, and lay a railing for their assistance. Be- 
tween these ravines, the whole wall is well timbered, 
and even more heavily clothed with an undergrowth 
of laurel. It is wild, up-ended country, where the 
deer roam and an occasional wildcat. 

Back of the 2,000 foot ridge, sloping much more 
gradually to the summit dome, is a region of smaller 
timber, jack pines, scrub oak, azalea, with hemlocks 
and birch in the fertile hollows. All this region 
surrounding the dome, as well as the summit itself, 
is a Massachusetts State reservation. On the peak 
is a steel fire observation tower, though the summit 
vegetation is storm dwarfed and no tower is needed 
for ordinary lookout. 

Just under the dome, to the north, and within 
the reservation, is a lovely pond. It lies more than 
2,000 feet above sea level, covers probably forty 



84 SKYLINE CAMPS 

acres, and is completely surrounded by hemlocks, 
which march down almost to the rocky shore line, 
to look at their reflections over the tops of the laurel 
bushes. In June, when the pink laurel borders the 
dark brown water of this mountain tarn, the hem- 
locks, with storm-twisted limbs, rise against a blue 
sky, and from the pathless woods ring the songs of 
the hermit thrushes, it would be hard to find a 
lovelier spot, even in the Rockies themselves. It 
is pleasant to scramble up the ravine from my 
house, with a blanket roll and a pack, to build a 
little fire beside this tarn, to hear the hermits blow 
their elfin clarions in the depths of the hemlocks, 
to watch the stars come out over the summit dome, 
and to drop off to sleep while the bullfrogs along 
the margin of the pond twang their G strings, deep 
answering unto deep. 

That is one face of the medal. The other is not 
so pleasant to contemplate. This really rather 
splendid mountain, wild, rugged, picturesque, for 
all its meagre 2,600 feet of height, is practically un- 
developed for recreational purposes — and, of course, 
it is fit for very little else. There is no trail up any 
of the ravines. There are two old roads, laid out a 
hundred and fifty years ago and long since aban- 
doned because of their steepness, which go up from 
the east, and in places are still open enough to 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 85 

follow, though the laurel is fast closing them in. 
Along my north boundary, the telephone wire to the 
observation tower goes straight up, and a trail is 
kept clear below it by the repair men. This is at 
present the only really cleared trail to the top, but 
it is extremely steep, passes by no water, and is 
uninteresting except as a means for attaining vio- 
lent exercise. There is no trail whatever around 
Guilder Pond, the beautiful mountain tarn under 
the dome. To get around it, you have to fight your 
way through forest and rank undergrowth. No 
clearings have been made by its shore, no camping 
sites, no provision for safe fires. So far as the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts is concerned, 
which through a commission of three men no doubt 
chosen for their political affiliations rather than their 
interest in recreation, administers the affairs of the 
summit acres of Mount Everett, nothing is of any 
importance but the construction of a so-called motor 
road up from the high plateau on the west side. 
This road passes one end of Guilder Pond and then 
starts up the summit dome. Beyond the pond, no- 
body uses it. The money gave out, anyhow, before 
it reached the summit, and it now ends nowhere — 
an ugly scar on the side of the cone. Any person 
of seventy-five years, in average health, could easily 
walk to the summit, up the footpath from Guilder 



86 SKYLINE CAMPS 

Pond. There was never the slightest need for the 
road. It is a pathetic monument to the stupidity 
and blindness of politically appointed reservation 
commissioners. 

What the commissioners should have done, of 
course, was to open up so much of the summit 
forests as they controlled to campers and hikers. 
There should be a trail around the pond, with sev- 
eral camp clearings, including fire pits, lean-to 
shelters, refuse disjDosal pits and neat signs, copied 
from those of the United States Forest Service in 
the West, instructing people in the proper use of 
fire, of camps, of the public domain. There should 
be trails leading from the base of the summit cone 
to two or three of the most interesting lines of de- 
scent into the Housatonic valley, and after they 
were built, or cleared out, the cooperation of in- 
dividuals or organizations in the valley should have 
been secured to connect them up with the highroad 
below. The most interesting descent of all, that 
through the ravine of virgin hemlocks — and how 
few stands of virgin timber there are left in Mas- 
sachusetts! — is controlled by the Commonw^ealth 
nearly to the base of the cliffs, and from there on 
the cooperation of the boys of the Berkshire School 
could doubtless be secured to keep the trail open 
and posted. As it is, nothing has been done, as 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 87 

I write, to clear out the devastation of the great ice 
storm of November 1921, there are no blazes, no 
trail, and when I recently sent up a party of twenty 
hikers, members of the Appalachian Club from 
Boston, by that route, it was with considerable mis- 
giving, since half of them were women. They were 
in for a severe two hours. 

If you stand on the summit of Mount Everett 
and look due north, you see fifty miles away the blue 
hump of Greylock, in the extreme northwestern 
corner of the State. Greylock is the only mountain 
in Massachusetts rising more than 3,000 feet. Be- 
cause of that fact, there was a road to the top before 
the Commonwealth took over the summit mass for 
a reservation. It is also provided with foot trails, 
some of which, however, in recent years have been 
allowed to close in so that they are difficult, if not 
dangerous to follow. The Greylock Reservation 
Commission, none the less, have always shown a real 
regard for the mountain, and a vision of recreational 
development. They have at least provided a camp 
site. 

As you look northward from the Dome to Grey- 
lock, you can observe the intervening topography. 
The two summits, in the two western corners of the 
State, are at either end of a more or less unbroken 
spine, which practically forms the Massachusetts- 



88 SKYLINE CAMPS 

New York boundary. East of the spine (which is 
called the Taconic Ridge), lies a plain, with scat- 
tered mountains in it, averaging about 2,000 feet in 
height. Then the land rises sharply again to the 
M^ild, broken upland plateau which is the main range 
of the Berkshires, the main link in the long Ap- 
palachian chain, the Taconic Ridge being a slender 
side link, as it were. It is perfectly obvious, how- 
ever, that when the Appalachian Trail is built, if 
that fascinating project ever is carried out, it must 
enter Massachusetts from Connecticut over the 
dome of Mount Everett, and it must enter Vermont 
from Massachusetts do^\n the Bellows Pipe ravine 
of Greylock. It must surely include, in other 
words, the two major summits of the State. The 
real problem is — how to get it from one peak to 
the other. . . . 

There is, alas, very little chance that the Ap- 
palachian Trail will be constructed before this book 
is published, so this may be a suitable place, before 
going further, to say something about that project. 
It is the dream of Mr. Benton MacKaye and others 
to build a skyline trail from northern Georgia, 
where the Appalachian chain begins, to the north- 
eastern outposts of the White Mountains, where it 
ends. It would, of course, be a foot trail only, and 
in many sections it could hardly be more than a 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 89 

blazed trail. It would take in, so far as possible, all 
the major summits, from Klingman's Dome to 
Washington, and in general it would follow the top 
of the highest spine. The project, which at first 
glance sounds both impractical and a trifle silly, has 
in reality a great deal to recommend it to the enthu- 
siastic interest of all lovers of the out-of-doors, all 
conservationists, all believers in the increased need, 
as our civilization speeds up, of periodic vacations to 
the wilderness. 

The Appalachian Trail would exist in its entirety 
chiefly for a sjaiibol — that is, nobody, or practically 
nobody, would ever tramp more than a fraction of 
its length. But if it existed, and if each individual 
section were built and maintained (as will have to 
be the case), by a local organization or organiza- 
tions, these organizations would be spurred to do 
their task well by the thought that they made the 
necessary link in the long chain; and, further, by 
gathering these organizations together for confer- 
ences, the people of the East would come more and 
more in touch with all that was being thought and 
done in the field of recreational conservation. 

For, ultimately, the Long Trail would be a sky- 
borne symbol of recreational conservation, physical 
and spiritual. All through the southern Appalach- 
ians, whether it follows the Great Smokies or the 



90 SKYLINE CAMPS 

Blue Ridge across North Carolina, and up through 
Virginia, the Trail will open up a wilderness which 
has got very speedily to be put into the National 
Forest domain, or serious consequences will follow. 
It is a region of extraordinary floral richness and 
scenic beauty, but at present for the most part inac- 
cessible to any but the hardiest trampers, and even 
they would find the task of following the sky-line 
ridge practically impossible. In that land of 
copious rain, the laurel and rhododendron " hells " 
are the equal of any tropic jungle growth for stop- 
ping progress and bewildering the stranger who 
penetrates into them. If, however, the aid of the 
southern mountain men could once be secured to 
open a trail along the range, and trampers from 
the plains, from all parts of the country, could get 
up on those splendid peaks (North Carolina has 
several mountains higher than Mount Washing- 
ton), and could drop down into those wild, deep 
coves between, where the clear brown water tumbles 
and the wild flowers riot, and the great hardwoods 
rise tall and straight as masts (when the lumber- 
men haven't been in) , and in sudden clearings, come 
upon without warning, the rough gray cabins of the 
mountain folk doze under pink geysers of peach 
blossoms, there would be a national awakening to 
the beauty of our southern highlands, and certainly 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 91 

the dim beginnings of an awakening to the need for 
forest conservation. Side trails, of course, would 
lead down to such points as Asheville and Virginia 
Hot Springs. The Long Trail would be made ac- 
cessible in sections. It would, properly laid out, 
open a vast region for recreation, and form the 
necessary entering wedge of the forest conservation 
drive. For, be it noted, j^ou can talk forest con- 
servation till you are exhausted, without results. 
But take your man into the wilderness, on a tramp, 
show him the woods, the falling water, the richly 
clothed mountain slopes; and then the naked scar 
of a typical lumber job, the slash, the fire, the 
dried-up brook bed, the washed- or burnt-out soil, 
the rich earth made desert for a hundred years — and 
you have accomplished what argument cannot do. 

I am getting a bit nearer home, now, and the 
end of my digression. It is planned to bring the 
Appalachian Trail into New England from New 
York State near the town of Kent, Connecticut, 
taking it through a Connecticut State reservation 
at that point. It Avill then come up along the hills, 
through a beautiful, high country easily accessible 
from the Housatonic vallej^ for week-end tramping, 
being but two or three hours removed from New 
York City, and will enter INIassachusetts along the 
ridge of INIount Everett. One would naturally 



92 SKYLINE CAMPS 

suppose that the Mount Everett Reservation com- 
missioners would awake sufficiently to carry it over 
the Dome and around the shore of Guilder Pond, 
where lean-to shelters would be constructed similar 
to those of the Appalachian Club in the White 
Mountains, and proper fire j)its and camp facili- 
ties provided. From this point to Greylock, the 
route of the Trail is, as I write, problematical (for 
that matter, the whole Trail is problematical!), and 
the possibilities oj)en interesting discussion. 

However it goes, it must for the most part trav- 
erse private proj)erty. How far can the tradi- 
tional Yankee attitude toward the sacredness of 
private property, the taboo of trespass, be over- 
come? What will be the result if it is overcome? 
If enough amenable private owners across Massa- 
chusetts can be found to route the Trail, will not 
each one of them become an interested agent for its 
maintenance and development? Or will their con- 
fidence be abused by the trampers, and the rights 
withdrawn? 

Again, shall the Trail follow the air line route, 
which is the Taconic Ridge? That is the short way. 
But it is also the way that lies farthest from the 
valley towns to the east where the help must come 
to build the Trail, and makes the Trail relatively 
inaccessible for one day tramps by the summer folk 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 93 

and week-end visitors. Chiefly, however, it seems 
to me, this route is the poorest because it ignores the 
opportunity to employ the Long Trail as a potent 
weapon in the conservation campaign. 

Looking northeast from the Dome, across the 
plain of the Housatonic just above the town of 
Sheffield, you see a rugged, forested ridge thrust- 
ing out from the Berkshire range. If the Long 
Trail were carried across the plain to this ridge, it 
could ascend it at once, and run a few miles north- 
easterly into a Massachusetts State forest of eight 
thousand acres. A forest of eight thousand acres 
would seem a mere grove in Oregon, but in Massa- 
chusetts it is considerable. This forest is on what 
is known as the Beartown Plateau. It is about 
two thousand feet above sea level, and though it 
boasted a considerable community a hundred years 
ago, is now gone back to wilderness. Few people 
ever go there. It is not in any way developed for 
recreational purposes, it is inaccessible, and, if I 
may say so, not properly advertised. To take the 
Long Trail into it would be to advertise it — that 
is, to advertise the whole idea of forest conservation. 
It is unfortunately true that you can tell a man over 
and over how short sighted it is to deforest the 
country, you can point out that Massachusetts now 
has to import eighty per cent, of its lumber, at ex- 



94 SKYLINE CAMPS 

tremely high prices, that in ten years even the west- 
ern supply will be gone, and so on, and so forth, 
while he remains indifferent, or, at the most, he 
fears that reforestation means more taxes. But if 
he has a piece of woodland which he enjoys for rec- 
reation purposes, the prosj)ect of putting it ruth- 
lessly to the ax rouses him at once. Having won 
with difficulty from a reluctant legislature a piece 
of State forest, those in charge cannot possibly do 
better than to open it immediately to the public for 
recreation. Build trails (useful also, of course, for 
fire fighting), build camp sites, rent permanent 
camps under proper restrictions, develop the rec- 
reational features, get the public in and give them 
the joy of the wilderness — and you have created 
automatically a group of people to fight the battle 
of conservation, whom no arguments can rally. 

So I would take the Long Trail into the Bear- 
town State Forest, where, I feel sure, the Forest 
Service would give enthusiastic assistance. The 
trail to the forest boundary would have to be con- 
structed by local organizations, and the mere build- 
ing of it would advertise the forest. Once built, it 
would carry an ever larger number of people, from 
near and far, into a conserved wilderness, and show 
them at first hand what timber conservation means. 

But north of the Beartown Forest, about a day's 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 95 

hike, lies a second State forest of more than ten 
thousand acres, the former William C. Whitney's 
game preserve on October Momitain. To reach it 
the Long Trail would have to descend from Bear- 
town into the beautiful Hop Brook valley, where 
the little village of Tyringham offers a chance to 
provision for those on an extended hike, or a con- 
venient starting point, in either direction, for those 
wishing merely to tramp for a day or two into the 
State forests. Directly north of Tyringham the 
Trail would rise sharply, beside a tumbling brook, 
and in three or four miles reach a fine body of wa- 
ter, in a bowl of the wooded hills, called Goose 
Pond. Here those organizations in charge of the 
trail building should, if possible, secure a section of 
lake front, and establish a camp site. The Trail 
keeps on north, across the trans- State highway, and 
speedily reaches a five-mile tract of roadless moun- 
tain wilderness. Just north of this lies the October 
Mountain reservation. There is a fine spruce for- 
est coming up on this reservation, there are brooks 
and a small pond, there are even moose. From the 
higher elevations a view of the distant Catskills, 
huddled on the western horizon, can be had on cleai* 
days. It is a wild, beautiful spot, admirably 
adapted for a recreational retreat. 

From the October Mountain forest the Trail 



96 SKYLINE CAMPS 

could descend, by the Roaring Brook ravine, to 
New Lenox, cross Yokun Seat between Lenox and 
Pittsfield, and speedily reach the Taconic Ridge 
again, easily accessible from the city of Pittsfield, 
and run directly up to Greylock. 

I have been thus sj)ecific about my own little sec- 
tion of the Appalachian Trail because that is the 
section I know best — even better than the White 
Mountain section, where so much of the work has 
already been done by the Appalachian Club, to the 
eternal gratitude of thousands of climbers ; and be- 
cause it illustrates so well, I feel, the opportunities 
for practical service which lie in this at first seem- 
ingly visionary scheme for a skyline path from 
Georgia to Maine. To build that Trail as I have 
roughly routed it across western Massachusetts, 
from the Dome to Greylock, would require the co- 
operation of two Reservation Commissions, of the 
State Forest department, of organizations in all the 
towns concerned, such as chambers of commerce, 
outing clubs, village improvement societies. Boy 
Scouts, and branches of the Appalachian Club, of 
scores and scores of property owners whose assist- 
ance would be essential, and finally of the officers of 
the New England Trails Club and others concerned 
with the larger aspect of the work. Such coopera- 
tive council in itself, apart from the actual Trail, 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 97 

would be a wonderful thing. If it could be brought 
about, and if the Trail could be put through, I my- 
self have little doubt but the ultimate result would 
be an insistent demand from many quarters for an 
extension of the State forests and reservations, even 
for the taking over by the Commonwealth of the 
more desirable camping places and the points of 
greatest scenic interest. We have, in the East, no 
national park at all, except on Mount Desert Is- 
land, and our national forest area is absurdly tiny. 
Yet it is in the East, rather than the West, that we 
actually need such areas most. The Long Trail 
might well be the beginning of the conversion of the 
Appalachian range into a public domain, to con- 
serve our timber, our water and our souls' health 
forever. Wilder dreams have come true, at any 
rate. . . . 

Have you ever built a trail? There is no more 
strenuous and delightful occupation. If the Long 
Trail is ever constructed, I hope it will be with the 
maximum of volunteer labor, and the minimum of 
money contributions employed to hire help. Vaca- 
tion gangs of young men and men not so young, 
cooped up for a year in cities, ought to be turned 
loose on the sky-line ridges, to tramp and chop their 
way back to rugged muscles and animal appetites 
and spiritual freedom. Nor will the work ever be 



98 SKYLINE CAMPS 

finished — Nature will attend to that. Every year 
the Trail will have to be cleared, every year the out- 
ing clubs can do their bit. 

To build a trail, the preliminary survey must be 
carefully made. Excepting for general direction, 
maps are of little service. Field-glasses help more. 
But chiefly one comes to rely on instinct. You 
have, let us say, to get from one summit to another, 
following a spine or connecting col, and perhaps 
crossing a ravine. Three things must be thought 
of — the shortest route, the best footage, the easiest 
future maintenance. A fourth consideration, never 
to be neglected, is the outlook, or the scenic charm. 
On your preliminary, or survey hike, over this 
stretch, you will, after some experience in such 
work, find your eye instinctively roving just ahead 
through the timber, the scrub or the bushes, and 
picking out the way which offers the easiest footing 
and the least contact with foliage, but without di- 
verging too much from the set direction. Follow 
that trail your instinct picks out, blazing it very 
lightly, and pausing rather frequently, at open 
places, to fix your direction and to look for any at- 
tractive features that you may be passing. After 
attaining your objective, return over the same coun- 
try, again trusting your trail instinct to pick out the 
best way. You will be surprised to find how nearly 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 99 

your two paths will coincide, except up or down ex- 
ceptionally steep places. There your instinct on 
the descent is usually to pick places you do not 
choose when ascending. Always plan the trail by 
your ascending instinct ! This reconnoitering for a 
piece of trail is a fascinating game, and one which 
Boy Scouts could be taught greatly to enjoy. 

When the trail is reconnoitered thoroughly, and 
you have made sure that it does not unwittingly 
miss a pleasant outlook or a good camj)ing site, 
where there is wood, water and the possibilities of 
shelter, the task of building it can begin. And it is 
a task, if you expect to sleep in a bed in the valley 
every night. Climbing two thousand feet every 
morning to work, chopping all day, and descending 
two thousand feet again in the evening, is not 
recreation. Take a tent (or better, build a shelter 
beside the trail, and leave it there), provisions, 
tools and the right companions, and go up on the 
hills to live with your job. That is the way to do it. 

The first rule in building a trail is to cut it wide 
enough. And the most difficult task in bossing en- 
thusiastic amateur trail builders is to persuade them 
of this fact. They are all for slashing ahead and 
making distance. A narrow trail means no trail by 
the second year, and even before the first season is 
over it means ingrowing branches and soaked cloth- 



100 SKYLINE CAMPS 

ing during or after a rain. You will want light 
axes, pruning shears, a couple of grub hoes — and a 
portable grindstone. Through brush and scrub, 
clear the trail at least six feet wide, and better eight. 
This will seem needless to you, for a foot trail, but 
it means an enormous saving of labor in future sea- 
sons. Grub out the stumps of such little trees and 
bushes as sprout a sucker growth — gray birch and 
white ash, for example. And don't heap the slash 
alongside of the trail, so that the spring growth will 
come up through it and make a horrid tangle to cut 
in the next season. Throw the slash clear out of 
the trail. Avoid, if possible, taking the trail 
through wet places, or places likely to be boggy 
after a rain, but if you cannot avoid them, look 
about for stones to sink in the footing, or lay logs 
on the higher side of the slope ( never on the lower, 
for they will rot into little dams and increase the 
bogginess ) . In the larger timber, remove all fallen 
trees across the way, by cutting out a four-foot sec- 
tion, and make your blazes in accordance with the 
custom prescribed by the trail clubs of your region. 
In general, avoid cutting anj'^ sizable standing tim- 
ber, and don't try to improve the footing, except to 
remove undergrowth. Any digging on the forest 
floor usually means erosion the next spring, and a 
rougher surface than before. Be content, through 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 101 

forest, with a well blazed trail, cleaned six or eight 
feet wide of undergrowth with clear vistas, going 
or coming, between blazes. Finally, on open rock 
spaces, or crossing fields or pastures, remember that 
there are fogs and clouds, while even in clear 
weather some people demand to be constantly reas- 
sured they are on the right road. Build stone cairns 
on the open rocks, not more than a hundred feet 
apart if the ridge is a high one, and not more than 
fifty feet apart if there is a precipice near by. Be 
sure these cairns are plainly artificial. When the 
trail crosses a field or pasture, have a conspicuous 
marker — a sign, bearing the name of the trail, of 
the organization erecting it, and the directions, is 
best — at each entrance. If these entrances are not 
visible one from the other, there should be a marker 
midway between. 

Now, when you and your gang have got up into 
the mountain forest, into the dense stands of laurel, 
for instance, which clothe so much of Mount Ever- 
ett, or into the storm-dwarfed, steel wire spruce 
which bristles over the upper rocks of the White 
Mountains, and have started cutting through a six 
or eight foot swathe, you will speedily discover that 
you aren't going to progress many miles per day. 
You will discover muscles that you never knew 
you had before, you will raise blisters on your hands 



102 SKYLINE CAMPS 

which you thought impervious, you will get hot and 
thirsty and tired. But when the afternoon shad- 
ows begin to steal down from the peak, when from 
some viewpoint, some rock headland you have won 
that day, you see the twilight creeping into the val- 
ley while the far hills are putting on their amethyst, 
and you shoulder your tools and tramp back over 
the bit of trail which has opened behind your axes, 
and bathe hot faces in the cold mountain brook and 
sniff the coffee boiling over the fire, and sit 
wearily down on the ground ( reaching first for your 
sweater) to await the evening meal — then suddenly 
a great peace and contentment will come over you, 
and you will know the reason for your toil. When 
the bacon and flapjacks are consumed, and pipes are 
lighted, and the talk drowses while twilight comes 
up the slope, you will hear the thrushes singing, you 
will hear a sea-shell murmur in the evergreens, you 
will hear the crackle of the evening camp fire, and 
that is all. It is enough. Perhaps, however, you in 
your section of the Long Trail will hear a distant 
locomotive whistle, the faint bay of a dog in the val- 
ley, a motor horn — but far av(>^ay, as in a dream. 
The stars will be much nearer to you, as they swing 
down over the dark tree tops through which you 
glimpse them as, rolled in your blanket, you fight 
the invasion of sleep to enjoy for a last moment 



THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL 103 

the delicious languor of healthy physical weari- 
ness. 

How many such camps would there be, I wonder, 
if the Appalachian Trail should be built in a year, 
section by section, from Georgia to Maine? Hun- 
dreds and hundreds of camps, thousands and thou- 
sands of men finding, not perhaps what William 
James called " the moral equivalent of war," but 
certainly the physical and in no small measure the 
spiritual equivalent of pioneering. To me it is a 
splendid vision. . . . 

A few years ago a friend and I set out to blaze a 
three-mile trail over a timbered mountain spine not 
far from our home in the Berkshires. It was to 
connect two existing trails, and add to the number 
of attractive tramps near the village. We secured 
the owner's permission, and spent several happy af- 
ternoons picking out a route which was not too diffi- 
cult, but which took in several somewhat precipitous 
ledges where the spleenworts made fairy gardens in 
the shadowed crevices, the columbines were red in 
spring, and the bluebells nodded. The actual work 
of trail-making was slight, consisting almost entirely 
of blazing the big trees, and signing the two en- 
trances. We had the satisfaction, later, of seeing 
the trail sufficiently used to pack a track on the for- 
est floor. 



104 SKYLINE CAMPS 

But it was on private proiDcrty, and private prop- 
erty is subject to private needs and vicissitudes. A 
year later the timber on that ridge was sold. Our 
trail was obliterated. And not only that, but the 
wild woodland charm of that three-mile ridge was 
obliterated with it. The ridge is now nothing but 
naked rock and slash. Except for the pleasure we 
got in doing it, our work went for nothing. The 
incident in itself is insignificant, but it illustrates a 
difficulty and a danger those who are planning the 
Appalachian Trail must face. The more private 
property that trail traverses, the greater the dan- 
ger of hard work gone for nothing, the more public 
property, State and National forests, town forests, 
parks, reservations, the Trail traverses, the less the 
difficulty and the danger, the greater the chance for 
permanent use and maintenance. Let us not stop 
with a mere dream of an Appalachian Trail. Let 
us dream of an Appalachian Reservation, from 
Georgia to the Presidentials. Dreams, they say, 
are suppressed desires. That dream is our desire, 
perhaps, suppressed by the cant of modern indus- 
trial and mechanical society, for the wilderness 
beauties, the wilderness health, the wilderness vir- 
tues, which we have so largely lost. They are wait- 
ing for us on the skyline trail. 



IV 

Crater Lake 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 




OUTHERN Oregon can be ex- 
tremely hot and dry in early July. 
We had motored leisurely doAvn the 
Pacific Highway from Portland, 
camping at night by some brook 
near the road, and reached the clean, pleasant, livelj^ 
little city of Medford on the second of the month. 
Medford lies in a level plain between the Cascade 
range on the east, dominated by the snow-covered 
volcanic cone of Mount McLaughlin, and the 
heavily timbered Siskiyou range on the west. The 
plain is extremely fertile, but extremely well pro- 
tected from rainfall. That, of course, does not 
matter to the farmers and fruit growers, with limit- 
less water for irrigation coming down from the hills ; 
but it affects the visitor unpleasantly at first, be- 
cause the soil becomes baked hard as a brick, and the 
side roads, which are not macadamized, are pow- 
dered to a fine white pumice dust. Medford is one 
of the chief starting-points for Crater Lake, and 
we had intended to remain there only long enough 

107 



108 SKYLINE CAMPS 

to stock up with provisions. We learned, however, 
that the upper end of the road to the rim of the lake 
was still deep in snow, and it would be three or four 
days at least before the Park rangers got it shoveled 
out so cars could pass. There was nothing to do 
but wait, in a withering heat that made it seem 
incredible any roads could be snow-blocked only 
eighty miles away. 

So we went back up the Highway a dozen miles, 
till we reached the Rogue River, which comes pour- 
ing down from the Cascades, and turned up a side 
road which paralleled the stream. Not far up this 
road we came upon a house sitting under two 
enormous trees, and backed by a grove of other 
large trees, with bark like smooth plates of copper 
and the glossy leaves of a laurel. This house was 
evidently of extreme antiquity — for Oregon. It 
dated, indeed, from the gold-rush days. It was 
rather long and low, with the simplest possible lines, 
and roofed with split "shakes" (a characteristic 
feature of the Northwest), which had weathered a 
lovely, soft gray. Two goats were watching us 
from the bank in front, suggesting that somebody 
lived here. A moment later, indeed, the resident 
appeared, coming down the hill slope across the road 
with an old prospector's pick on his shoulder. He 
was a man well past middle life, who spoke with a 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 109 

pronounced Yankee twang, and confessed that his 
home was Rhode Island. He also confessed that 
he would like to go back there, but didn't have the 
money. His search for gold had now become but 
a forlorn hope that he might strike enough to buy a 
ticket " back East." He was, meanwhile, living in 
a room of this old house, which he had provided with 
a padlock. Opening the door, he invited us into a 
room which boasted a stone fireplace, around which 
the original builder had erected a mantel so evi- 
dently modeled, with the rough boards at his dis- 
posal, from his memory of a Colonial mantel, that 
it gave me a strange shock of surprise. He had 
even attempted, with narrow strips of wood, to 
panel pilasters at the side. Then I thought of the 
nearest town — Medford; and of the towns we had 
passed through on our way — Portland, Salem, for 
example. Those names told the story, no less than 
this echo of a New England fireplace. 

The presence of this gray old house, and this gray 
old prospector, led us to turn in behind the enclo- 
sure, driving over the baked ground and burnt grass 
as if on pavement, where we found, amid a grove 
of the coppery laurel trees and the tough manzanita 
bushes, a pleasant, level opening on the bank of the 
river. The bank was about fifty feet high, however, 
for the river has cut down through the volcanic soil 



110 SKYLINE CAMPS 

to the underljang gravel, and it was covered with a 
fine growth of yellow pines and hardwoods. A dim 
path led down to the river beach, for water and 
bathing. There were plenty of tough dead man- 
zanita stalks and tree limbs for fuel in our portable 
cook stove — and we needed no other fire in all con- 
science. So here we stopped, unloaded the cars, 
and set up our camp. It turned out to be a place 
much richer in interest than I had at first supposed 
possible. The discovery, in the Avaste heaps of 
naked, water-worn gravel and hot, dry sand along 
the river, of the yellow lupine would alone have 
made it memorable to me. There were thousands 
of these lupine plants, some of them more than two 
feet tall and quite as wide, covered thick with flow- 
ers of a bright, pure yellow. Many of them had 
already begun to ripen their seeds, and I gathered 
quantities of the ripest I could find, hanging the 
plants in the sun to complete the process. I 
brought home, I suppose, a pound of these seeds, 
which in that arid soil produce such glorious bloom 
— and not a seed ever germinated in my garden ! 

But the greatest attraction of our Rogue River 
camp was furnished by the birds. I have seldom, 
if ever, had so good an opportunity to watch so 
many birds, and with so little effort. When the 
Fourth of July came, and with it the news that the 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 111 

Crater Lake road was still blocked, the rest of the 
party decided to brave the heat and go down to 
Medf ord and Ashland for the day, it being rumored 
that great doings were afoot in these lively com- 
munities. That was just what I wanted. With 
the old prospector up on the barren hills with his 
pick, and all our party gone to town, this bit of 
timber beside the river would be quite undisturbed, 
and I could watch the birds to my heart's content. 
When the cars had departed down the road, in a 
cloud of pumice dust, I got out a large notebook 
and pencil, I removed a considerable portion of my 
clothes, and all that day I watched, or scribbled, or 
wandered softly and quietly through the trees or 
by the water. When night came, and the celebrants 
returned, I made a final entry in my notebook, by 
the light of our camp lantern, and wrote the cap- 
tion: 

A Rogue River Fourth of July 
It is the Fourth of Julj^ Everybody else has 
gone down to Medford, fifteen miles away, leaving 
me alone in camp. A Fourth of July without fire- 
crackers, without oratory, without people, in fact, 
but with the blithe association of birds, appealed to 
me. That is why I am alone. 

The Rogue River is a considerable stream, some- 



112 SKYLINE CAMPS 

thing over a hundred yards across, with a swift 
current breaking into rapids just above our camp 
so that the gentle roar is incessant. Coming as it 
does directly down the canons from the main 
Cascade range, its water is still greenish in color 
(as all glacier water is), and bitterly cold, as I dis- 
covered to my sorrow when I dove off the bank this 
morning. The bank where our camp is pitched, in 
a grove of scrubby oak, laurel trees, tall yellow 
pines, and manzanita bushes, is fifty feet above the 
water, and I look down on its agitated green floor 
between the high, straight boles of the long-leaved 
yellow pines which spring from the base of the 
bank. I have found a cattle path down through 
them, which leads by an easj'^ grade to a beach of 
clean white sand. Just back from the stream, on 
either side, the wooded hills go up sharply for five 
or six hundred feet. These canon hills have been 
the scene of much prospecting. Last night, getting 
firewood for the camp, we stumbled over a pros- 
pector's pick which fell away from its rotten handle 
when we lifted it. I have been using it to-day to 
dig up the bulbs of a small blue lily from the baked 
ground. Just upstream from the camp, in fact, 
the bank has been completely dug over to a depth 
of twenty feet, the excavation extending back sev- 
eral hundred feet into the hill; and not far bevond 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 113 

that point we discovered the mouth of a shaft, al- 
most hidden by tall mulleins, which went straight 
into the gravel and volcanic rock as far as the eye 
could see. As it was untimbered, we did not care to 
investigate far from the mouth. I have no idea 
how much gold was ever taken out of these diggings, 
but it is safe to say that the energy required to move 
so much stony earth with a pick, shovel, and wheel- 
barrow would have yielded quite as useful a return 
applied in some other way. But perhaps without 
the miners to pioneer we should never have had the 
fruit orchards down on the plain. 

At any rate, the miners have gone now, all but 
one old prospector from Rhode Island, nature is 
covering their scars, and I am alone under a brilliant 
blue sky, for the dry season is on, and the sparse 
grass in the openings of the wood is already burned 
brown, the soil packed hard as cement. Alone, did 
I say? Well, hardly that. I think I have never 
spent a day in the woods with a more numerous 
and varied set of companions. One never quite for- 
gets any pleasant camp where he has seen the sun 
set and the day break, or even where he has stopped 
to build a little fire and cook the noonday bacon. 
But this camp above the rushing Rogue River will 
always stand out in memory above most of its fel- 
lows because of its bird life, because I made so 



114 SKYLINE CAMPS 

many new friends here, and saw again so many old 
ones ; because for a whole long summer day the life 
of the woods, in the air and on the ground, went on 
about me quite as if I didn't exist, and all I had 
to do was to drag out my pneumatic sleeping bag 
from the tent into the shade of an oak tree and lie 
upon it quietly, to be a part of the forest com- 
munity. 

The day began well when I went down to the 
river to bathe. Three mallard ducks, evidently 
feeding in a shallow under some willow shrubs, 
scooted out over the water, and as I was dressing a 
Canada goose went bj^ neck out, beating with great, 
strong wings his sj)lendid way up the gorge. It was 
scarcely three minutes later that a shadow, like a 
quick, darting wraith, swept the beach, and I looked 
up to see three fish-hawks over the water, circling 
steadily. Even as I watched, one of them dove in 
midstream, went clean under like a dropped plum- 
met, remained submerged while I counted four 
slowly, and then came forth again and took the 
air without apparent effort, bearing a good-sized 
fish in its talons. I would have been quite content 
with this exhibition before breakfast, but on my 
way up the bank to camp, I saw the flash of a big 
bird in an oak tree, and then of another. Stalking 
them as quietly as I could over the crackling dead 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 115 

leaves, I got within clear vision of a pair of ravens 
before they sounded guttural alarm and took flight. 
Unlike Samuel Scoville, I had never scaled a preci- 
pice to see a raven's nest. Indeed, so far as I 
know, I had never seen a wild raven before. Just 
why it should be so exciting to see a bird that is new 
to you, for the first time, I cannot say. Probably 
it isn't exciting to a great many people. But all 
bird lovers will know how I felt, as the great black 
fellows shone glossy in the dappled shadows of the 
oak, and then took flight. 

After breakfast I took a stroll through the piles 
of round, water-worn stones heaped up by the 
miners in days past, and now half overgrown by 
such verdure as flourishes in this semi-arid region — 
willows and alders by the stream, scrub oak, poison 
oak, manzanita (cousin, evidently, to our blue- 
berry), blackberry vines, burnt-up grasses, and 
acres of gorgeous yellow lupine, some of it, for- 
tunately, so far gone that I could gather the seed. 
As I walked there was an almost incessant little 
rustle and scurrying amid the sticks and leaves by 
my path, causing me at first to look warily for 
snakes, since it seemed excellent country for rat- 
tlers. But I soon discovered that a small, brown- 
ish-gray lizard, the length of your middle finger on 
an average, was the cause. He is known here as 



116 SKYLINE CAMPS 

the swift, and certainly justifies his name. With- 
out apparent effort, running low like a mouse, he 
glides over a stone, under a stone, a foot up and 
then around a tree, with astonishing speed. On a 
tree or a dark stone, too, he is protectively colored. 
I attempted to pick up one which lay on a flat rock, 
and got my hand within an inch of him, when 
suddenly he was on a rock a full foot away, making 
the leap across what was for him a yawning chasm 
so quickly and with so little apparent effort that he 
merely seemed to be transferred by magic from one 
stone to the next. Again I attempted to touch 
him, and he went down the second stone and under 
a piece of wood. I sprang to the wood and lifted 
it. There was nothing beneath but sand! After 
a day and night in camp, I have come to know where 
to expect each rustle, along the paths a camper 
makes, amid both the rocks and dry woods. The 
swifts, evidently, are restricted in range, each 
choosing a tree or rock which is his particular ref- 
uge. 

As I wandered through the stone piles, some 
larger object in motion presently caught my eye, 
and two hundred feet away, lumbering much like a 
woodchuck along a ridge of stones, went a fat 
badger. I might have attempted to pursue him, if 
almost my first step forward had not put up two 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 117 

birds quite strange to me, seemingly from the very 
ground. They did not flush, but ran along a ledge 
of rock, the female with little clucking cries. 
About the size of large quail, they were colored 
more like slate pigeons, which indeed they rather 
resembled, except for noticeable crests and a much 
surer and trimmer action on the ground. I went 
at once to the spot whence they had emerged, and as 
I peeped over a little shelf of rock, out from a sandy 
dust bath below scattered four baby birds, mottled 
brown and white and flying strongly away into the 
bushes. These birds are what the Oregonians call 
valley quail, distinguishing them from the bob 
whites which inhabit the Willamette valley farther 
north, and from the so-called California quail. The 
young of the valley quail fly almost as soon as they 
are hatched, like our eastern ruffed grouse. 

I saw no other unfamiliar bird in the stone piles, 
though my boyhood friend, the kingfisher, was sit- 
ting hoi:)efully in a shrub overhanging the trout 
rifiles. But when I returned to my tent, watching 
on the waj^ the beautiful flight of a turkey buzzard 
which was patrolling the forest much as the aero- 
planes farther north are patrolling the great res- 
ervations of fir, I found that the ravens had been 
up to some mischief or other and greatly offended a 
small flock of beautiful birds with extremely ugly 



118 SKYLINE CAMPS 

and insistent voices. The offended birds were 
squawking and chattering in the pines, and pres- 
ently I got a good look at one, close to. He was 
a blue jay, but not at all like our eastern blue jay 
in color, though closely resembling hini in size, 
shape, and noise-making proclivities. The Oregon 
jay is so deep a blue that he appears almost black 
in a pine tree, a very dark gun-metal, and it is only 
when he flies and the light catches on his wings that 
you would surely say he was blue. He has a fine, 
back-sloping, pointed crest, holds his head proudly, 
and is in every way a conspicuously handsome fel- 
low. I saw no actual attack on the ravens, but 
there was much squawking and flying about and 
guttural repartee on both sides, till at length the 
ravens rose and swept away, leaving the jays to 
discuss the matter all the rest of the day. 

In the afternoon, however, I did see a fight, and 
as picturesque a one as I was ever privileged to 
witness, staged high in the air over the middle of 
the gorge. Directly across the river from our 
camp, in a grove of pines, the crows were calling 
this morning, and from time to time I would see one 
dropping into the tree-tops. It may be a late nest- 
ing. At any rate, in mid-afternoon, while I was 
lying on my bed watching the branches above me, 
I heard a crow's excited battle note over the water, 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 119 

and ran to a clear space on the bank to see what 
was going on. A small hawk, too high up and in 
too hard a light for identification without glasses, 
was circling over the water and the opposite pines, 
while a single crow, making four or five wing beats 
to every one made by the hawk, was flying over it. 
Every so often the crow would dart down at the 
hawk's head, but seldom quite striking it, and as it 
darted past it uttered its angry cry. The hawk was 
making no noise at all, but persisted in its steady 
circling, except when the crow got too close, or, per- 
haps, actually hit it. Then it in turn would dart 
down at the crow, now just below it, which would 
dash frantically lower, turn, and rise once more to 
its original strategic position overhead. The 
aerial evolutions were repeated over and over, and 
at first I could detect no method in the crow's at- 
tack. Gradually, however, as the birds wheeled and 
circled around, I could see that all the crow's dives 
were made from the same general direction, and that 
the hawk, sheering off a bit to avoid the possible 
blow, always had to sheer downstream. Conversely, 
when the crow, in its drop, went below the hawk, 
the latter, in its retaliatory attack, was M^orked still 
further west. At the end of fifteen minutes the 
battle was almost out of sight down the gorge, and 
not long after the crow came winging back, alone. 



120 SKYLINE CAMPS 

If I didn't know crows so well, I should attribute 
this apparent strategy to accident, but the crow, I 
feel sure, is entirely capable of such a campaign. 
Certainly no military aviator could have manoeu- 
vered his plane more skilfully and craftily to drive 
off a stronger enemy. 

When I returned to my lazy couch in the 
shadows, I was soon roused by a familiar song — 
familiar and j^^et not familiar. It was the song of a 
bluebird, and yet it was not a bluebird, for every 
now and then the singer varied it as he had no 
business to, or ended it with a series of rather harsh, 
whistling notes. I rose and j)ursued him for some 
time through the scrub before at last I got a good 
look at him in a willow thicket. It was unmistak- 
ably a catbird, trim and long-tailed, but brownish, 
with white on the wings and with a raspberry-red 
breast like the bluebird it Avas mocking — on the 
whole, not as trim and striking a fellow as our gun- 
metal catbird of the East. But it was not long 
after that there darted swiftly and silently into my 
vision a strange bird which was a thing of arresting 
beauty. It was piu'suing a white moth, which it 
caught on the wing, and then it perched on a limb 
close by, in full view, to eat its prey. A trim, well- 
built bird of medium size, not quite so large as a 
robin and much racier in type, it was a brilliant 



EIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 121 

primrose-j^ellow in color, with black wing-bars and 
a circle of Indian red around each eye, not clearly 
defined on the circumference, but shading off into 
the yellow. Its breast, too, was dyed with this same 
red. The bird, so tropical in its aspect, so vivid 
amid the dappled sunlight of the wood, remained 
close by for an hour or more, darting now and again 
after an insect, like a fly-catcher. To see this bril- 
liant stranger for the first time was like one's first 
glimpse of a cardinal. When he finally left me, I 
hoped against hope that he would return. He was 
the so-called Louisiana or western tanager, first 
mentioned, I think, by Lewis and Clark. 

He did not return, but I had the consolation of a 
message from home. My first intimation was that 
" thin, wiry cJieej) " which Thoreau speaks of, and 
then, right OA^er my head, startlingly close, the full- 
throated, cheerful, ringing, cMchadee-dee-dee! I 
whistled the mating call, but the birds (there were 
two) did not answer it. They hopped nearer, 
however, down the pine tree, until they were hardly 
ten feet overhead, and fluttered and cheeped in their 
curiosity for ten minutes or more. It was, indeed, 
a reminder of my own Berkshire hillside three thou- 
sand miles away. 

The blow of an ax that broke my solitude turned 
out to be nothing more disturbing than a downy 



122 SKYLINE CAMPS 

woodpecker. A song sparrow sang in a clearing 
close by. Through the open woods several young 
robins were hopping, their breasts still speckled. 
A black-and-white warbler hopped on a limb over 
the tent, and at least two other varieties of war- 
blers were visible, but not close enough for identi- 
fication. I neither saw nor heard any thrushes. 
These woods are hardly cool enough for them. It 
is, I presume, the dry weather hereabouts which has 
driven so many birds down along the river. Back 
on the hills there is little water till you come to the 
Cascade range, and no doubt many of the insects, 
also, are drawn toward the stream. Even the 
rabbits are, for that matter. Before supper I went 
out along the road between the river-bank woods 
and the canon hills, and there I met a large jack- 
rabbit coming toward me. He didn't see me, how- 
ever, though I don't know how he could have helped 
it, till he was Avithin fifty feet. Then he started, 
stared, looked intensely ashamed of his carelessness, 
turned tail and bounded back along the road a bit, 
then took one long, easy spring into the woods. 
Just where he had vanished into the woods I 
started, a moment later, three more jacks coming 
down as if to cross the road to the river. They 
scurried into the scrub, where I could glimpse them 
squatting, waiting for me to pass by. 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 123 

Farther on, I turned doM^n to the stream again, 
hearing the noise of Avater roaring, and discovered 
that the river poured over a ledge, making a low, 
irregular waterfall. The stream here was split by 
an island, and that portion of the river on my side 
was much the smaller, not much larger, in fact, than 
a good-sized brook, flowing rather in a series of 
broken rapids than over a fall. I pushed through 
the dense willow scrub at this point, to see what I 
could find, and quite as if Nature were conspiring 
this day to show me the best she had, my eye was 
attracted by a bird perched on a rock in midstream 
a little way above me. Grasping a willow branch, 
I leaned far forward to get a clear view, and 
watched, for it was the first chance I had ever en- 
joyed of observing a water ousel at work in a 
stream. It is a fascinating bird, not only because 
of its habits, — it nests in behind waterfalls, and its 
song is as liquid and lovely as the song of the brook, 
— but because of its trim little body, its pretty 
mouse-gray coloring, with a lighter patch on the 
breast, and its businesslike activity in the water. I 
say in the water advisedly. The bird I was watch- 
ing made a pretense of standing on the stones in the 
stream, and pecking with his rather long bill into 
the moss upon them. But half the time his slender, 
snipe-like legs were submerged, and his bill and 



124 SKYLINE CAMPS 

whole head went under the rush of water as he 
pecked the moss below the surface, or seemed, even, 
to be snatching at something in the current. Every 
now and again the current would toss a wave 
against him and bowl him off his pins, sometimes 
completely submerging him, but, quite untroubled, 
he would emerge on a new perch lower down, give 
his wings two or three brisk flaps, scattering the 
spray, and resume his businesslike search for food. 
Not being web-footed, his easy control of himself 
in this rushing current was remarkable. By the 
time the stream had pushed him along to a point 
opposite me, I expected he would take fright and 
fly away, but he minded me no more than if I had 
been a tree, hopping once close to my feet, and then 
allowing himself to be carried on past, down to clear 
water. At the foot of the ra^oids he took the air, 
and, flying so low that he almost touched the top 
of the waves, he went quickly by me again, up- 
stream, and disappeared, j)erhaps to begin the 
operation all over again. Unfortunately, he was 
perfectly silent, so I could not renew acquaintance 
with his song, which I first heard on an unforget- 
table evening beside a stream that leaped down 
from a glacier on the Great Divide. 

I returned to camp along the river shelf, partly 
on sand, partly on glacial and water-worn gravel 



BIRDS OF THE ROGUE RIVER 125 

or lava ledges. Westward the river made a wide 
turn, so that I looked downstream to a high, wooded 
wall, hazy blue now with the long afternoon 
shadows. In the sunlight between me and this 
hazy backdrop everything over the river, for a mile, 
was thrown into relief. It was amazing to see the 
number of birds darting in this free space, search- 
ing for supper, not alone the bank swallows, but 
hosts of both smaller and larger birds. Back in 
camp the jays were squawking and squeaking, first 
two, then rapidly a dozen, in one pine tree, while a 
pair of small birds, which I couldn't get a good 
look at, were piping angrily and shrilly. Evi- 
dently they were offended at something the first 
pair of jays had done, and the squawks of these 
jays had brought the rest of the tribe. The racket 
lasted five minutes, and then as suddenly subsided, 
while out of the ensuing silence, above the gentle 
roar of the rapids and the rustle of the dry manza- 
nita leaves stirred by a cool evening wind, came 
sweet and clear the vesper notes of a song sparrow, 
familiar and beloved. . . . 

So, without fireworks or oratory, my Fourth of 
July by the Rogue River has ended. When the 
rest of the party returned, the coffee was boiling 
over the fire and I was tossing crumbs to a huge 
gray ground squirrel which had become — after con- 



126 SKYLINE CAMPS 

siderable coaxing — tame enough to approach the 
edge of the camp, grab a morsel, and dart away 
with it. They asked me if I hadn't been lonely, 
but I couldn't honestly say that I had. 



THE BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 




T was the evening of July fifth before 
we got word that the last blasts 
which would break the snow barrier 
across the Crater Lake road were to 
be fired the next morning, so we 
were up with the sun on the sixth, that we might 
get as early a start as possible. We had only 
seventy-five miles to go, but seventy-five miles in 
Oregon is not the same thing as the run from New 
York to Pawling. In those seventy-five miles we 
would have to ascend six thousand feet, and over a 
road which was already deep with pumice dust, and 
badly cross-rutted. We took our last plunge in 
the Rogue River, saw our last western tanager 
flashing like a bit of gold and copper in the trees, 
and said farewell to our "habitation enforced", hav- 
ing found it a far pleasanter spot than, in our first 
impatience at the delay, we had guessed it could be. 
The day was excessively hot — hot all over the 
United States, we learned later. The second motor 
fell far behind the first, to avoid the choking dust, 

127 



128 SKYLINE CAMPS 

but, even so, its occuj)ants speedily became almost 
unrecognizable. At first the road led through a 
narrowing valley, where agricultural outposts of the 
plain below had ventured, and established cool, 
green oases of alfalfa beside the irrigation ditches. 
But as the valley narrowed still more, and the river 
rushed greener and louder, the sides began to go up 
steeply and to carry large timber, and finally we 
were in a true mountain gorge, with the highway 
climbing the side higher and higher above the brawl- 
ing stream. Some day it will be a paved road, but 
it wasn't yet, and between the dust, the thank-you- 
marms, the narrow width and precipitous bank, 
which made a meeting with another vehicle a matter 
of prayer, and the steadily mounting red mercury 
in the radiator meter, our progress was slow. It 
was noon before we came to a settlement on the 
edge of a forest, where there were numerous sum- 
mer camps and a filling station. From this settle- 
ment on for a dozen miles the road suddenly 
straightened out into a wide, arrow-like boulevard 
(dusty, to be sure) which crossed a level plateau 
through the heart of a superb stand of Douglas 
firs — a part of the Crater Lake national 
forest. There may be drivers who put on speed 
when they reach this point in the road, but I cannot 
conceive of such creatures. The trees are by no 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 129 

means the largest you can see in the Northwest, but 
they are three and four feet through, they tower 
two hundred feet straight aloft over your head, and 
they grow massed thickly together, in a soil that 
can evidently meet the full demands of a virgin 
forest. INIile after mile j^^ou slide up the arrow- 
straight aisle of the highway, and mile after mile 
your eye goes off in endless perspective down the 
lanes of this gold-flecked, columnar temple. Once 
we stopped to let the engine cool, and I got out to 
examine a four-foot butt which had been sawed 
through cleanly and moved to one side, in making 
the road. ( Enough fir timber was cut down con- 
structing that strip of highway to build a village.) 
At the foot of the log-end was a pile of fresh saw- 
dust six inches deep, which puzzled me, because the 
cut was evidently several years old. Examining it, 
I saw a weather crack half-way up, running hori- 
zontally across the butt, a crack into which you could 
insert a lead pencil. As I watched, to the edge of 
this crack, from the dark interior, came a large 
black ant, with a bit of fresh wood in its mouth. It 
stopped at the rim of the precipice, dropped the bit 
of wood over, and went back. Another appeared, 
and another, and another. All along the crack 
heads kept appearing, each with its bit of fresh 
sawdust. Now and then, for some curious reason I 



130 SKYLINE CAMPS 

could not determine, one of the ants would walk out 
over the rim and down the precipice an inch or 
more, before dropping his load. Why he went to 
this extra exertion, I could not see. I rapped the 
great log sharply, and several ants rushed to the 
edge of the crack, in alarm, looking out, and even 
climbing a way up and down the butt end. But 
they all went back. Not an ant was visible on the 
ground, or coming up or down the butt to this cave 
dwelling. They were all evidently hard at work 
inside, making the home. As the log was four feet 
thick, and about forty feet long, and, in that dry 
climate, with its natural weather-resisting qualities, 
would last for years and years, the analogy of this 
ant dwelling to one of the cliff dwellings of the 
Southwest was not at all fanciful. The chamber 
that was being hollowed inside could only be 
reached by the one narrow crack, more than two feet 
above the ground, on the smooth-sawed butt end. 
Nothing except another insect could get into it, and 
it could be easily defended at the opening. Even 
an ardent scientist would have hesitated, on a hot 
day, before he started chopping into that log to 
expose the interior. 

Scarcely a mile beyond this point we came, quite 
suddenly, upon a clear, brown creek flowing rapidly 
under the road and into the forest, the first water 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 131 

encountered for many miles. Just off the high- 
way, and beside this creek, in a beautiful grove of 
tall, stately, overarching firs, the Forest Service has 
established a camp site. The ground has been 
cleared of undergrowth, sanitary facilities erected, 
a garbage-disposal pit dug, and neat signs placed 
here and there to instruct such campers as need 
them (and, alas! many do) in the proper use of fire 
and in camp cleanliness. We stopped here for 
lunch, finding four or five cars ahead of us, with 
tents already pitched for a staj^ of a day or two. 
The contrast between this beautiful and convenient 
camp site, so carefully planned for the use of the 
touring public, and the reception one would meet 
almost anywhere in the East in his efforts to camp 
for the night beside the road, was one of those 
things which strike you anew every time you travel 
in the West, especially if you enter the national 
forests. New York State, to be sure, is already 
waking up to the fact that the automobile is here 
to stay, and that in thousands of cases it can get 
whole families out into the country who cannot 
afford to put up at hotels. The provision of camp 
sites, on the public domains, is almost as much a 
useful duty of the state as the construction of the 
highways. But most eastern states are lagging far 
behind the West in this respect, and behind the 



132 SKYLINE CAMPS 

Federal Forest Service, in spite of the niggardly 
funds Congress doles out to it to work with. It 
ought to be possible to run from New York, let us 
say, to the White Mountains and find camp sites 
in state forest reservations all along the route. 
Perhai^s, some day, it will be — but never, alas ! will 
those camps be canopied by Douglas firs ! 

The thermometer, which we had placed in the 
shade while we ate, registered 86 when, at two 
o'clock, we resumed our journey. The cars were 
soon overheated again, and we toiled slowly up the 
increasing gi-ade, past the entrance gate to Crater 
Lake National Park, still through forested country, 
with little or no indication of mountains. Then 
quite suddenly, at a turn of the road, we glimpsed 
through an opening a snow-clad pinnacle ahead. 
Farther on we came to rushing water again, where 
Anna Creek store and post-office sit at the junction 
of the Medford road and the other entrance road in 
from Lake Klamath, to the southeast. Here we 
were told that cars were being sent up and down 
on a schedule, as it was impossible to pass. We 
were still within the up-traffic hour, so we kept on, 
by a steep grade, through forests and lush green 
creek bottoms, and soon through banks of snow. 
The road grew muddy, the drifts wandered away 
through the green trees, and at Government Camp, 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 133 

a mile beloM^ the rim of the lake, we actuallj^ felt 
their chill. From here on we needed chains. 
Again and again, on the steep grade, the road was 
but a muddy ditch between two walls of snow as 
high as the car, snow still blackened with the 
powder used to blast it out. The trees grew fewer, 
the undergrowth sparser below them, till at last the 
ground, where it showed at all, was like bare gray 
ash, so recently had the snow melted. We ran at 
length through a long snow ditch, on a level stretch, 
seeing ahead of us a circle of snow-draped volcanic 
rocks, an hotel, and what looked like a gray sand- 
bar between us and the invisible ocean. Behind us 
the ravine up which we had climbed dropped back 
into a dark green hole of forest. 

Stopping the car beside the hotel, we still could 
see no lake, for in front of us was that rise of gray 
ash, like a sand-bar, cutting between us and the sky. 
Si)ringing out over the doors and laden running- 
boards, we dashed up this slope — and stopped 
abruptly. 

Directly under our feet the earth fell away in a 
vast slide of rock and volcanic ash, at an angle of at 
least fifty degrees. It fell away for eleven hundred 
feet, and if you once started down that incline, you 
would keep on to the bottom. It fell away into a 
huge hole, and as we looked to right and left, and 



134 SKYLINE CAMPS 

then across, we saw this hole as an almost perfect 
circle, six miles in diameter. At the bottom of the 
hole lay Crater Lake, with the evening stillness com- 
ing on it, so that it held in reflection all the slides 
and snowdrifts and white-capped lava pinnacles 
that ring it round, held them reflected in a mirror of 
inconceivable blue. You have seen water blue as 
the sky, but this is not sky-blue, it is much deeper 
and richer. It is not Mediterranean nor Caribbean 
blue. It is a strange, opalescent indigo, with a 
penumbra of green around the margin where there 
are shallows. It is opalescent indigo — and yet that 
does not describe it, for it is capable of many varia- 
tions and mystic changes, dusky moods of Prussian 
gi'ayness, richer moments, under a wild sunset, of 
solemn purple; yet always, somehow, itself, its own 
incomparable and indescribable color. 

As I stood on the rim, with that wild, tremendous 
and yet exquisite prospect smiting my every sense, 
my mind went first, I think, back to the prospector 
who, three quarters of a century ago, wandered up 
these slopes from the river gorge below, and first, of 
all white men, suddenly beheld this miracle. There 
was no hotel beside him, no road behind him. He 
and his horse stood together, alone in the up- 
heaved wilderness, and looked for the first time on 
the most beautiful lake in America. Had he not. 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 135 

after all, found something more precious than 
gold? 

But our reflections were cut short by the camp 
leader's orders. The hour was late. We had still 
to find a camping site, to pitch our tents, to gather 
wood and water. Just back from the rim the 
timber comes up the outer slope of the mountain, 
leaving a sort of pumice beach between itself and 
the sharp, sudden drop to the lake. In this timber 
the government permits all to camp who wish. 
But now the road along the rim was blocked with 
snow, and the woods, too, were full of drifts. With 
the aid of a shovel w^e ploughed the cars through a 
few drifts till we reached a place where we could 
carry the tents across a stretch of snow to a group 
of firs where the ground was bare. Here we strung 
our tents and made our fire, after considerable 
search for dead wood that had been uncovered long 
enough to dry out. Around us, wherever there was 
open ground, green things were peeping through, 
and some spots were already carpeted with a low, 
pink phlox {pJilox diffusa), much like our phlox 
suhulata used in eastern rock gardens, though a 
shade less bright in color. Already, as the sun set, 
the air was chilling, and we dug out long-unused 
sweaters, and remade our pneumatic sleeping bags 
with extra blankets. The radiators of the cars, too. 



136 SKYLINE CAMPS 

had to be drained, which seemed a foolish precau- 
tion when we thought of the temperature we had 
been through but a few short hours since. Yet 
with the coming of starhght the snow percej)tibly 
stiffened up, and we finally crawled shivering into 
our bags, with a cold night wind tugging at the 
tents and working in under the flaps. The man 
who invented the sleeping bag, in which you are 
wrapped impervious to wind, and who added the 
blessing of a soft pneumatic mattress beneath you, 
which can be inflated even on a stone to give you 
perfect rest, should surely be entitled to enjoy the 
most comfortable corner of Paradise unto the end 
of time! 

When I rose in the morning the water in our pail 
was like ice, and as I went out into the first level 
rays of the sun that were shooting from over the 
snow-capped battlement of Garfield Peak, and 
started across the drift which lay between me and 
the rim, my boots squeaked on the frozen snow, and 
scarcely left a print. At the camp water-tap (the 
government has to pump the water up from a 
spring down in the woods, for there is no water on 
the rim), there was half an inch of ice on a little 
pool beneath the spigot. The night wind had died 
completely away, and the day's heat, as yet, had 
caused no new disturbance. The blue lake far be- 



n 




BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 137 

low me, quick to ruffle into a nasty chop and quick 
to settle into calm, was now as still as that " glassy 
sea " upon which the cherubim and seraphim cast 
down their golden crowns, for reasons that I used 
to speculate on in vain when, as a child in church, 
I read the hymnal as a lesser evil than listening to 
the sermon. The westward walls of the crater 
were warm with the sun, and their smooth inclines 
of snow or pumice, and their precipitous snow- 
capped peaks, especially the great dome of solid 
lava called Llao Rock, were as clear cut in the water 
as above it. Remembering Emerson's argument 
for idealism, to look at a familiar landscape through 
your legs, and encouraged by the fact that at this 
early hour I was alone on the rim, I stooped over 
and looked at Crater Lake between my legs. But 
here the argument for idealism did not work, for 
the landscape upside down was the same as right 
side up, save for the fact that the reversed sky was 
a deeper blue. 

The elevation of the rim where I stood, which is 
a fair average for the entire rim, is slightly over 
seven thousand feet. At one point on the east it 
sinks to within five hundred feet of the water, and 
at several points around the circumference lava 
peaks stand up over eight thousand feet, but it is 
fair to call seven thousand the average elevation of 



138 SKYLINE CAMPS 

what is left of the huge volcano, posthumously 
christened Mount Mazama, From its diameter at 
this level, and from the angle at which the outer 
slopes rise, as well as from the similar size of Mount 
Shasta, geologists calculate that the original moun- 
tain was between fourteen and sixteen thousand 
feet high. Some terrific eruption, one of those 
which deposited the volcanic soil over the North- 
west, hollowed this cone out to a mere shell, cracks 
and vents were made at near the present level of the 
rim, and the whole uj)per portion of the mountain 
collapsed into the crater, leaving a vast and seeth- 
ing hole. Later another eruption started to build 
the mountain anew, from the bottom of the caldera, 
and succeeded in pushing up a little cone eight 
hundred feet above the present water level, which 
now appears as an island, like a pile of cinders par- 
tially covered with trees. Wizard Island, as this 
cone within a crater is called, was evidently the last 
major effort of the mountain. It cooled into a 
tremendous caldera, or bowl, with a jagged rim, 
and four thousand feet deep, measured from the 
highest point on the rim to the deepest point on the 
bottom. And this huge vessel, fed only by the 
snows and rains which fell through the ages on its 
floor and the steep inner sides, gradually filled half- 
way up with water, making the Crater Lake of to- 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 139 

day, which, over a goodly portion of its area, is two 
thousand feet deep. What gave this water its 
magic blue I cannot say. Various theories have 
been put forward to account for it. I am content 
to accept the fact, and let who will theorize. At 
any rate, in a setting of unique geological interest, 
it is the blue jewel of the world's lakes. 

Yet, like any other spot on the earth's surface, of 
course, you cannot know it at a glance, nor appre- 
ciate it in a day, in a single mood. Unfortunately, 
however, a day is as long as many tourists remain. 
They come to the rim, they look at the lake, perhaps 
if the snow has melted they drive around the rim 
road which the government has constructed, — a 
forty-mile run, — they dance that evening in the 
hotel, and the next morning they depart! There 
being little but the lake to see, they think they have 
seen it. But they have not. They have no more 
seen it than you would have seen the beloved fields 
around your home if you came to them a stranger 
and departed with the sun. To see it you must de- 
scend to the water, you must row out over it, j^ou 
must drift around the shore under those two-thou- 
sand-foot towering cliffs, you must climb to the top 
of one of those rim pinnacles, too, in order to grasp 
the fact that you are actually on the spine of the 
Cascade range, and that this lake is in a mountain : 



140 SKYLINE CAMPS 

you must explore the forests and search out the 
wild flowers; above all, you must come to feel that 
blue jewel as a living presence, to greet it in the 
morning, to watch its sunset moods, its starlit mys- 
tery, its moonlight magic. To do all that, you must 
stay by it a week, at the least, and preferably in 
your own camp, as far away from the hotel and the 
centre of camp life as you can bring yourself to 
carry water. The one objection to camping is the 
fact that so many Californians will be camped near 
you, ready on any pretext, or on none at all, to way- 
lay you and talk about the climate of California. 
Asking them why they came to Oregon does no 
good at all. They are impervious to any irony less 
pointed than a hard push which precipitates them 
over the rim to the lake a thousand feet below — 
and, of course, one hesitates to resort to such ex- 
treme measures, great as the provocation is. 

There is but one trail down to the water, and 
without a trail the descent is extremely difficult and 
dangerous, however carefully you choose your spot. 
On our first day at the lake, this one trail was still 
snow-blocked, but the boatmen and one or two fish- 
ermen had been down and got a few boats out, and, 
being possessed of Alpine stocks and a rope, we saw 
no reason to wait. But even as we started down, 
the government gang appeared, armed with 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 141 

shovels, and began on the trail. When we were 
two or three hundred feet below them, we had to 
work down through a sharp ravine, like a bottle 
neck, into which the concavity of the drift was 
drawing all the lumps of snow tossed out by the 
trail breakers above. As they saw us approaching 
this chute, they redoubled their efforts, and rained 
upon us a veritable barrage of snow-cakes, which 
attained tremendous velocity long before they 
reached us. Some of them were large and solid 
enough to knock your feet out from under you, or 
give you a staggering blow on the head, and we 
clung to our rope as we passed through that bom- 
bardment with more tenacity than on many a 
steeper slope, later in the higher mountains. 

But we gained something more than excitement 
by this descent. Tremendousness is measured by a 
mote, and a precipice is only appreciated by a 
climber. It means little, when you stand on the 
rim of Crater Lake, to be told that the water is 
eleven hundred feet beneath you, because it does 
not look that far, in the clear mountain atmosphere, 
and even the two-thousand-foot cliff of Llao Rock 
does not greatly impress you at a glance. But 
once you have descended those eleven hundred feet 
with danger and effort, even once you have walked 
down and up the mile of steep trail, you have a new 



142 SKYLINE CAMPS 

conception of the depth. Still more do you have 
it when in a boat at last you float out on the bottom- 
less blue water, suspended in some strange blue 
medium between an inverted world and an upright, 
and see the naked sweeps of pumice, the vast 
debris slopes of broken conglomerate, the gray and 
pink and brown cliffs of lava rock, shoot one thou- 
sand, two thousand feet right above your head, to 
meet the snow. It is then, at last, that j^ou realize 
the majesty as well as the beauty of Crater Lake. 

That first day we rowed across to Wizard Island, 
landed on one of the great black blocks of lava 
which form its base, and toiled up the steep trail 
which winds the eight hundred feet to the top. 
Above the base it is apparently entirely composed 
of volcanic cinder, and you would pick it as the 
most unlikelji^ of places for vegetation. Yet it sup- 
ports a forest of considerable size, and wild flowers 
in gay profusion, especially Indian paintbrush and 
a peculiarly bright-hued, attractive, low pentste- 
mon (pentstemon Davidsonii, I think), which 
would be a boon to any rock gardener if he could 
grow it. I am suspicious, however, of all these 
Cascade Alpines for eastern gardens. They are 
adapted to a climate that gives them little moisture 
in summer, and to a soil that is almost exclusively 
volcanic. 




Crater Lake after an Early Snowfall. Wizard Island Crater in Centre 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 143 

The summit of Wizard Island was a delightful 
spot. It contained a perfect little circular crater, 
almost one hundred feet deep, partially filled on one 
side by a huge snowdrift down which we skiied on 
our boot soles at a tremendous speed. The circular 
rim was studded with dwarfed evergreens which 
gave us shade, and sitting beneath them to eat our 
lunch we looked out on all sides at the lake, and then 
at the ring of higher walls that laid their pointed Al- 
pine firs and hemlocks, their lava crags and drifts 
of snow, against the sky. Almost as on the water 
itself, we seemed suspended between two blue 
worlds, of sky and water. 

Descending, we took to our boats again, and 
drifted around in the shallows along the shore of the 
island, with spinners astern for trout. I am told 
that this is an unsportsmanlike way to fish for 
trout, but not being a fisherman I cannot say just 
why. The true sport, I presume, shows his superior 
cleverness by so casting a fly that it deceives the 
fish. However, it seems to me but a matter of de- 
gree. He has to be cleverer at deception, and he 
has to use a smaller hook, so that the fish can resist 
longer, give him more " fight." The real sport, it 
seems to me, w^ould be the man who dove overboard 
and caught the fish by outswimming him. But 
doubtless I am talking nonsense. I hasten to say 



144 SKYLINE CAMPS 

that, in our unsportsmanlike manner, we caught six 
large trout, weighing three or more pounds apiece, 
of a variety I shall not try to name, because no 
two " experts " at the hotel could agree on the 
subject. It is said that the lake was entirely devoid 
of fish when discovered, and eastern brook trout 
were used to stock it. If that is true, these brook 
trout have undergone a strange transformation on 
their new diet and in their new environment. But 
perhaps that is possible. At any rate, we took our 
six up the trail, now shoveled out so that we 
switchbacked across the drifts we had slid down in 
the morning, and placing part of them in the 
natural ice-box by our tent door, — a snowdrift, — we 
cooked the rest for dinner. The meat was salmon- 
red, but firm and delicious, and the coffee that 
night, and the fried potatoes, and the bread and 
jam, and the saucers of sliced pineapple, and the 
quiet cigars in the twilight, were like a benediction 
on the arduous day. It is actually true that no 
coffee is ever so good as camp coffee, boiled in a 
smoky old kettle over the fire, with clear spring 
water; and it seems true always, at the time, that 
no food is so good as that which waits you on the 
camp table, after a hard day in the open. William 
James used to say that a cup of coffee at the right 
moment could alter a man's whole philosophy of 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 145 

life — an argument, of course, against the dual the- 
ory of mind and body. The camp mess is another 
argument. Digestion waits on appetite; yea, 
though for a year you have been on the strictest of 
diets, and fried foods are poison to you, you will 
come in after twenty miles in the saddle and eat 
fried dish after fried dish, only to feel stealing over 
you a vast content with the universe, a vast sense 
of peace and well being, a vast appreciation of space 
and silence, and an equal contempt for worry and 
fret and the insect cares that annoyed you back 
there in the moil of cities. . . . 

Another day we climbed Garfield Peak — a sim- 
ple enough matter, to be sure, for the peak is just 
east of the hotel and rises but a thousand feet above 
the level of the rim. Few climbs of a thousand feet, 
however, so well repay the effort. At first the trail 
led us along a shelf of broken volcanic soil and rock, 
which was rich with wild flowers, a true Alpine 
garden. Among the number I particularly noted 
a prostrate shrub which I coveted. You would 
hardly have detected it as a cousin of Jersey tea, 
yet it was the ceanothus prostratus, popularly called 
mahala mats. Here the prostrate foliage grew 
thick and stiff, quite like a little mat, indeed, and 
above it peeped the pretty little lavender-blue 
flower heads. It was growing close to the path, 



146 SKYLINE CAMPS 

amid low, broken rocks, and in such a situation it 
supplies not only bloom and cover, but a certain 
wiry sturdiness that is captivating. Not far be- 
yond the station of this plant we came to a long, 
steep slope of broken lava fragments which slid 
away for five hundred feet, into the forest below, as 
if some gigantic dump cart had emptied a load of 
crushed stone off the trail. A more desolately 
naked and unpromising spot for wild flowers could 
hardly be imagined; yet here, of all places, down 
the whole length of this dump, and for the hundred 
or more feet of its breadth, were our friends, the 
chalice cups! We had seen none before, and in- 
stantly the picture sprang to our memories of Grin- 
nell Meadows in Glacier Park, where they gTcw in 
the lush, damp grass, with the lake beside them. 
Here they had no moisture except what had been 
supplied by the snow which but recently had melted 
off. A few more days, and that would be absorbed 
in the broken soil. Indeed, no real soil was evident. 
The flowers appeared to be growing in a rock heap. 
We sprang off the trail, and scrambled down the 
slope, the broken lava slipping and sliding under 
foot and threatening to start a landslide at any 
moment. There were hundreds, thousands, of the 
glorious anemones, some in full bloom, some in bud, 
some but just forcing their foliage up. And there 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 147 

was absolutely no other vegetation on this section 
of slope ! Some might come later, to be sure, when 
the drift had been longer gone, but as yet there was 
no sign of it. The anemones had the lava heap 
quite to themselves, with a proud exclusiveness that 
befits their beauty. To right and left, where the 
broken lava met the softer pumice, was a visible 
dead line which they did not cross. We had found 
none below this point, and we found none above it. 
I purposely went all the way down the rock drift 
and searched the ravine at the bottom to see if some 
had not sown themselves there, but none could I 
find. They had selected the one spot, and held 
to it. 

Half-way up the peak the path skirts the edge of 
the precipice above the lake known as Eagle Crags, 
and here it is well to pause, fifteen hundred feet 
directly above the blue depths of the lake, because 
from that perch you may perhaps see, as we did, a 
great raven go sailing out from the cliff, his head 
and wings cut sharp against the blue beneath, and 
the sunlight, striking down upon him, turning his 
glossy black feathers to the iridescent colors you 
sometimes see on a shining lump of coal. A great 
black raven soaring over the hole of Crater Lake 
is a noble spectacle, and there is nothing melancholy 
about him. Indeed, his raucous cry has rather a 



148 SKYLINE CAMPS 

merry ring to it, and is a welcome sound in the vast 
silence of lava crags and space. 

From this point on we had no trail, for the snow 
lay deep. However, it was also soft and gave easy 
footing. The man with the motion-picture camera, 
which he had brought up on his back, paused on a 
shelf below the peaked summit, and told us to go on 
up to the top, and then walk along the extreme 
edge, so he could photograph us against the sky. 
Now it so happened that the extreme edge, whereon 
we were directed to walk, was a snow cornice, pro- 
jecting over a precipice a hundred feet high. Stand- 
ing below, the camera man assured us this cornice 
would " hold an elephant." Standing above, we 
asked for the elephant, to make the trial. At last 
we compromised by walking within five feet of the 
*' extreme edge," which enabled him to get us down 
to the knees. After that, we had attention to give 
to the view. 

Here, at last, on the peak of Garfield, you realize 
the true situation of Crater Lake, as a part of the 
Cascade range. To the east we looked almost di- 
rectly doAvn into the far-stretching level desert of 
eastern Oregon, lying out bluer and bluer like the 
sea. Southward we looked along the flank of the 
range itself, over holes of forest and peaks of snow, 
past the great, dazzling-white pyramid of JMount 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 149 

McLaughlin, until far away, so far it hung like a 
faint white cloud on the horizon, was the mystic 
bulk of Shasta. Westward the eye traveled over 
broken, wooded summits, like waves of the sea, and 
you knew that somewhere beyond them lay the 
Pacific. To the north, in the hole at our feet lay the 
lake, the peaks around it like summits in the range, 
and beyond them and it the needle point of Mount 
Thielsen, and then, farther on, the white pyramid of 
Diamond Peak showed how the Cascades march 
northward. The lake is a blue jewel set deep, but 
set high up in the mountain spine. . . . 

Another day, and we sailed above down-plung- 
ing precipices to the Phantom Ship — and that was 
the best of all. The day that followed I took my 
notebook deep into the woods down the outer slope 
behind the camp, where I had no companions but 
an inquisitive badger, once the shy, frightened 
glance of a black-tailed deer which shot hastily 
away, and a pair of camp robbers who, with their 
uncanny sense, sighted food and perched their 
beautiful plump bodies in the limbs directly over 
my head, and tried to get up courage to snatch the 
sandwich from my hand. There I wrestled feebly 
and with profound vexation at the stubborn thing 
called language, to set down the memories of the 
day before. I have tried it again, with the event 



150 SKYLINE CAMPS 

more distant. Poetry, said Wordsworth, is emotion 
remembered in tranquillity. But the result is not 
more satisfactory, so, for better or worse, I shall 
transcribe from my notebook : 



The Garden of the Phantom Ship 

I have discovered the most beautiful garden in 
the world, — at least, today I think so, for I am still 
under its spell. It is a rock garden, too, and if 
any one had told me a week ago that I would give 
the prize for beauty to a rock garden I should have 
laughed in his face. But yesterday I spent six 
glorious hours on the garden of the Phantom Ship, 
and I am converted — converted, that is, to Nature's 
design. More than ever, though, I would turn from 
the artificial rock garden as the most futile of horti- 
cultural goals. To see the garden of the Phantom 
Ship is to learn the folly of false rock piles, and to 
turn anew to the quieter ways of phlox-bordered 
paths or violets and bloodroot underneath the trees. 
Somewhere in England there is a " reproduction " 
of the Matterhorn, forty or fifty feet high, and cov- 
ering an acre. Upon it are planted thousands of 
Alpine flowers. It probably cost a fortune — and it 
is absurd. It is an horticultural satire on man and 
his pompous insignificance. The true rock garden 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 151 

is " the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos " — and 
the chaos is quite as essential as the rose. 

We went swiftly down the trail from the rim lo 
the water, finding the lake placid on a cloudless day, 
loaded our boats, and pushed out, rowing eastward 
under the precipitous and jagged wall of Eagle 
Crags, which rose two thousand feet above us, a 
wall of sombre grays and browns, of warmer reds, 
and touched with green where the hardy Alpine firs 
found a foothold, or with white where a snowdrift 
hung. The reflection plunged down two thousand 
feet beneath us, into the bottomless blue of the lake, 
and we, in our cockleshells, floated, as it were, mid- 
way up a four-thousand-foot precipice. When you 
get down on the surface of Crater Lake you dis- 
cover, too, that it is not the almost flawless circle it 
seems from above, for the shore line is broken by 
bays and headlands, adding to its wild impressive- 
ness. We followed this broken shore line for an 
hour, rowing steadily toward a small rock fragment 
which could be seen at the base of Dutton Cliff, 
seemingly but a half-mile away. 

At last we drew near it, and it separated itself 
from the base of the cliff, disclosing a gap of open 
water. Small, did I say? It was a jagged slab of 
lava, perhaps two hundred feet long, up-ended in 
the lake with its top broken into three tall spires, 



152 SKYLINE CAMPS 

rising more than one hundred and fifty feet from 
the surface of the lake. And suddenly we knew it 
for what it is, a ship of lava forever setting sail 
from its moorings at the base of Dutton Cliff, point- 
ing its bow across the blue toward the sunset. They 
call it the Phantom Ship because from a distance 
it is often impossible to discern it, so cunningly does 
it melt into the two-thousand-foot precipice behind. 
The Phantom Ship! You wonder at the miracle, 
for it is not often the fate of such natural objects in 
the public domain to be christened with imagina- 
tion. 

We shipped our oars as we slid nearer this proud 
ship of rock, that not even their drip should break 
the reflection — and suddenly, looking into the water, 
a new and for the moment an overmastering wonder 
of Crater Lake was disclosed. We saw no bottom 
at all, gazing down merely into an opaque blue 
mass; then, in the space of a boat's length, the 
bottom was plain beneath us, how far down we 
could not say, but probably fifty feet. Quietly 
manoeuvering the boats around, and taking advan- 
tage of their shadows, we drifted back again, watch- 
ing intently. Yes, there was the bottom, almost 
level, below us — an under-water shelf or base of the 
Phantom Ship. And, without any warning, as 
suddenly as the wall of a house drops from the 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 153 

gutters, the shelf vanished down into the bottomless 
depths. We were sailing over the rim of a tre- 
mendous precipice. My head is as steady as most 
men's, and I have never yet suffered any dizziness 
on the most precipitous of climbs, yet I confess that 
here, as the boat drifted over that rim and the 
bottom below us mysteriously vanished into the 
very hollows of the earth, my imagination was 
stronger than my nerves, and I had a moment of 
sharp reaction, sitting back faint in the skiff. There 
are people who, once experiencing this sensation on 
Crater Lake, will not go out on it again, though to 
us, at least, after the first shock, the sensation was 
one of profound fascination, and we rowed back and 
forth over the under-water precipice rim, dropping 
bright coins on the visible ledge, which we could 
watch descend and see plainly as they lay on the 
bottom, far below us. 

With our eyes focussed through the water, we 
had not yet noticed the reflection of the Phantom 
Ship, which presented its precipitous south broad- 
side to us. But presently we looked upon the water, 
not through it; and on a surface faintly agitated 
by our boats and a vagrant, wandering air, a surface 
of exquisite blue, we were aware of the towering 
brown outline of the ship, floating softly as if con- 
scious of its loveliness — of its towering brown walls 



154 SKYLINE CAMPS 

and masts, and then of curious spots of orange-red, 
a hot, vivid orange-red on the vivid blue water of 
Crater Lake, a daring color combination, surely! 
Our eyes rose now from the water, to see the source 
of these spots, on the shij)'s side itself — plant after 
plant of the flaming Indian paintbrush, growing 
apparently out of the very rock, and burning with 
an intensity of color I have not seen equaled else- 
where in the western mountains, this plant being 
peculiarly variable in coloration under different 
environmental conditions. 

Then we rowed in close, found a single landing 
place on the southern wall of the ship, and began 
our exploration, for even out on the water it was 
apparent that the paintbrush was not alone in this 
up-ended garden. Actually outnumbering the 
paintbrush plants, and on a closer view quite as 
conspicuous, were fine, sturdy clumps of the low, 
spreading pentstemon, previously found on Wizard 
Island and on the rim. They seized upon little flat 
ledges, sometimes gayly crowning a sharp peak of 
lava, and they clung even in vertical cracks, stream- 
ing gracefully down the face of the cliff, all of them 
in full and luxuriant bloom without a particle of 
visible soil or moisture for their roots. Perhaps 
thirty feet above the water line the side of the ship 
slopes steex^ly back a little, before the leap of the 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 155 

masts, and on this shelf cling a few sturdy but 
storm-dwarfed pines; and in patches of broken- 
down rock, like a fine sand, grow several clumps of 
a striking stonecrop, with copper-colored stems, 
copper-colored edges to the thick, bladder-like 
leaves, and bright copper-colored centres to the bril- 
liant cream-yelloAV flowers. On the rocks, too, are 
a few sparse grasses, a fern or two, and down at 
the water's edge a willow shrub. 

This was all the variety of verdure on the south- 
ern face of the Phantom Ship, and of course, in 
relation to that great, upright wall and the leaping 
masts of lava, it was little enough. A gardener 
would consider the display quite inadequate. Yet 
actually the exquisite restraint of it, on that sheer 
lava precipice carved like the side of a great, proud 
ship, or like the dream battlements of King Arthur's 
palace, rising above the bottomless blue of Crater 
Lake, and under the very shadow of Dutton Cliff, is 
its crowning charm. They are such brave little 
flowers, so hardy, so gay, clinging there amid wild 
tremendousness, as if Nature Avere asserting with 
one easy gesture her power to collapse and carve the 
very globe and not forget what is exquisite! 

And as if further to remind us of this power of 
hers, which is the secret of her magic, the bird life 
of the Phantom Ship, invisible from afar, M^as dis- 



156 SKYLINE CAMPS 

closed to us as we explored, entranced, the southern 
rock face — disclosed by a buzzing hum over our 
heads. Looking up, incredulous, we saw not one 
humming-bird, but no less than a score, hovering 
over the pentstemon and paintbrush, their tiny 
wings beating to a blur as they hung suspended 
against the face of the cliff, or carrying them with 
darting flight from rock to rock. One expects to 
see nothing less than a bald eagle on the crags of 
Crater Lake — and here, in the very heart of the 
frozen upheaval, were the darting wings of hum- 
ming-birds, the thrust of dainty bills into the honey 
drop of a flower ! 

Rowing presently around the bow of the lava 
liner, we found the northern side a shade less pre- 
cipitous, with a landing place where we could make 
fast the boats, and above our heads a considerable 
stand of sturdy little pines, clinging like a gi'een 
stunsail to the ledges. From this landing we could 
scramble up to the spine of the rock, or the hurricane 
deck, and even work down on the other side to 
examine and photograph the sedums. The secret 
of fertility in the Northwest, of course, is the vol- 
canic origin of the soil, and here on the Phantom 
Ship, where there is nothing but lava blocks and 
pumice, the rapid breakdown of the conglomerate 
into dust makes something which can support plant 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 157 

life where life would seem to be impossible. Some 
of the pines, growing apparently out of solid rock, 
have attained a diameter of eight inches or more, and 
dress the cliff side like whipped green sails. On 
the northern face, too, we found a tiny slope car- 
peted with a gay j'^ellow flower rising a few inches 
from a bunch of pungent light-green leaves which 
smelled like tansy when crushed. This little flower, 
evidently an arnica, closely resembles a dwarf sun- 
flower, and is about the size of a silver dollar. It 
would be a valuable addition to dry, rocky spots on 
estates in the Northwest, though probably it would 
not thrive elsewhere. Here, too, we found a shrub 
much like our eastern wild currant, but with 
dwarfed habits, naturally, and white blossoms ; also 
several bushes of the service berry, only now, in 
July, in flower, though its eastern relative, the shad- 
bush, whitens the swamps in earliest spring. There 
were a few more small and inconspicuous flowers 
also in bloom at this time, not found on the steeper 
southern face. On the whole, however, the hot 
orange-red Indian paintbrush, the pretty clumps of 
purple pentstemon, and the gay groups of sedum, 
adorning the brown and gray ledges and pinnacles 
of naked lava, were the flowers Nature had chosen 
to deck her ship for the launching. 

The largest and tallest mast of the Phantom 



158 SKYLINE CAMPS 

Ship can be climbed. But I hardly recommend 
that climb to any but experienced rock scalers. It 
is a charm of this garden that so much of it is in- 
accessible! With the exercise of proper care that 
what you grasp with your hands does not give way, 
you can get within forty feet of the peak of the 
most easterly pinnacle, or rear mast, without great 
difficulty. We took a motion-picture camera that 
far. But the last forty feet are a different matter. 
They are only climbable because the pinnacle has 
split apart, making a clean cleft about twenty 
inches wide. Into this chimney you insert yourself. 
Then, if your shoes are properly shod with spikes, 
or, better, with hemp, you can work upwards by 
pushing your back against one rock while bracing 
your hands on the other, and lifting your feet. 
After your feet are set, you brace with the push of 
your legs and get your hands a little higher, at the 
same time hitching up your shoulders. By this 
method it is possible to scale the forty feet of the 
chimney in an hour or so, that is, if your muscles 
hold out that long. You can descend in a few 
seconds on a doubled rope, or even more rapidly if 
your grip gives way. The view from the pinnacle 
has little to recommend it over that from the base, 
but of course one doesn't climb rock chimneys for 
the view. In fact, it has never been satisfactorily 



BLUEST LAKE IN THE WORLD 159 

determined why one climbs them. One simply 
does it — or he doesn't. And if he doesn't, he can- 
not possibly understand the man who does, espe- 
cially as the man who does cannot possibly tell him. 
Fred Kiser declares that the urge to climb is acci- 
dental in its origin, and results from the combina- 
tion of a strong back with a weak mind. I have 
often wished my back were stronger. 

We ate our lunch on the deck of the ship, be- 
tween two masts, and a twisted little pine flung out 
an arm above us to frame the view out across six 
miles of blue water to the down-dropping crater 
walls. At our feet were gay and dainty flowers, 
above our heads were lava pinnacles. The sun was 
settling toward that western rim when we pushed 
off at last, and looking back saw the reflection of 
the ship dancing on the ripples of our wake, its 
spots of orange and purple color flashing like opal 
lights on the crest of a tiny wave. Behind it 
towered the naked slopes and frowning crags of 
Dutton Cliff. The ship itself was no pygmy thing, 
with its one hundred and sixty-five feet of up-ended 
lava pinnacles. And under the boat there again 
was the bottom falling away into the bowels of the 
earth ! Yet, dancing lightly on the blue water were 
the reflections of flowers, and up against the rocks, 
in the sunlight, was the flash of a humming-bird's 



160 SKYLINE CAMPS 

wing — the soft whisper of a dainty charm above 
the roar of earth's upheaval ! 

With the memory of that day, brought back to 
me so vividly by these pages from my notebook 
( for to one's own memory the poor shorthand of his 
language is sufficient), I would say farewell to 
Crater Lake. But our farewell to the garden of 
the Phantom Ship was hardly over before we were 
crying hail to the garden of Minto Pasture, and we 
were camping beyond the last Calif ornian, not in a 
lotus land, to be sure, but a land of larkspur, which 
is quite as satisfactory. 



Mount Jefferson 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 




ROM Crater Lake to the little city 
of Bend, or town, as we in the East 
would call it, is a long day's run in 
a motor, long and excessively dry 
and dusty, over a road which dis- 
courages all attempts at speed. Leaving the Na- 
tional Park by the eastern entrance, we ran south- 
easterly and then north, over the level " desert " of 
eastern Oregon, but not far enough away from the 
range to be out of timber. Practically the entire 
journey to Bend, which is about half-way up the 
state, lies at present through a forest, sometimes of 
jack pine, in dense, ugly stands (the jack pine is 
one of the few trees, I think, which can be called un- 
reservedly ugly), and sometimes of yellow pine. 
There are but two towns on the entire stretch of one 
hundred and seventy-five miles, and you are easily 
able to pass through either one without seeing it 
unless you are watchful. The yellow-pine forests 
alone give interest to the journey, and that is some- 
times a sad interest, when you run into a section 

163 



164 SKYLINE CAMPS 

where the lumbermen have preceded you, or are at 
work. 

The yellow pine (pinus ponderosa) is the tree 
which furnishes a lumber sometimes sold in the 
East as western white pine, sometimes more 
honestly called western soft pine, for the true white 
pine is much superior. It grows, apparently, only 
on the arid eastern side of the ranges, subsisting and 
making truly splendid stands on an annual precip- 
itation of but nine inches. Its distinctive appear- 
ance marks it out from every other pine, and should 
long ago have made it celebrated, one would sup- 
pose. Yet it is the least known of our major forest 
trees. In the old stands the trees attain about the 
girth of virgin eastern white pines (alas, few of my 
readers have ever seen, probably, a stand of virgin 
white pines!), though occasionally reaching a diam- 
eter of six feet; but on the whole the stands are 
lower ; certainly there is perceptibly less clear wood 
before the branches. It is the bark which makes 
these trees distinctive, a coppery-red bark laid on 
in large, even, flat scales, the long diameter vertical, 
joined neatly together and fitting the trunk snugly. 
The effect is one of almost metallic neatness, trim- 
ness, and polish. The soil is too dry to support a 
dense stand, so the trees, strikingly uniform in size, 
are spaced well apart, with little or no undergrowth, 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 165 

the gray-brown volcanic ash often showing like a 
carpet. Consequently a great deal of sunlight 
strikes through, shining gayly on the cojiper-bright 
trunks and lighting up the whole clean, park-like 
forest till the eye can travel long distances through 
it. It is not a forest of mystery, but it is one of 
pleasant oddity and almost bizarre charm. 

We were struck, however, with one curious fact. 
There seemed to be no young forest coming up, and 
in so open a wood the shade ought rather to have 
encouraged seedlings than discouraged them. 
Presently we ran into a section of national forest, 
and lo! the forest floor was alive with seedlings, 
gi'owing in such dense stands in some of the open 
spaces that you could hardly have crowded through. 
The explanation became simple — in a word, fire 
protection! In a land of so little rain a fire starts 
easily and spreads rapidly over a forest floor which 
is at all littered. Burning through dead grass and 
shrubs and needles, it can sweep out all seedlings, 
leaving only the major trees. And how many 
fires have swept through the Oregon forests, no man 
can count. After a time we ran into one — into a 
land of wild desolation, first, where the lumbermen 
had been, taking every tree, leaving literally not 
one seed-bearer to the hundred acres, but leaving 
all over the ground heaps of dry and brittle slash; 



166 SKYLINE CAMPS 

and then into the smoke of the fire itself, where we 
saw the fiames eating through the slash, licking up 
abandoned logs, scorching out the humus, and kill- 
ing every seedling in their path. Needless to say, 
this was not in the national forest. It was in one 
of those forests owned by the powerful, intelligent 
men, the " master minds " who " develop the 
country's resources." 

Before we reached Bend we came upon their rail- 
road and their huge lumber camp. On the edge 
of Bend we saw their gigantic sawmill, built at a 
cost of $3,000,000, with a mechanical ingenuity 
that makes you gasp as the huge machinery takes 
logs from the water and dumps them out on a plat- 
form half a mile away as boards and boxes. Yet, 
with all our ingenuity to devise machines, we as a 
nation have not yet the intelligence to devise a way 
to save our forests from the unrestrained greed of 
the few; we have not yet learned that developing 
our resources is quite a different thing from deplet- 
ing them; we have not yet had sense enough to 
compel a man or a corporation which can afford to 
build a $3,000,000 sawmill, at least to leave one 
seed-bearing tree to the acre and keep out fire. We 
have stripped our forests in the East, and now we 
are stripping them even faster in the West. We 
are not nearly so smart as we think we are. 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 167 

Aiiiid these melancholy reflections we rolled into 
the town of Bend, and deserted our skyline camps 
temporarily for a hotel bed and a bath. They 
Avere good beds, for in this little city we found an 
extraordinary hotel, but I cannot say they were 
any better than our pneumatic sleeping bags. A 
bath, however, after one hundred and seventy-five 
miles of Oregon dust, is another matter. And so 
were the fresh raspberries on the dinner table, and 
the cream from a cow. 

For various reasons we remained several days in 
Bend, and I became rather intimately acquainted 
with the town and many of its people. If this 
were the place, and it were any part of my purpose 
to write about Main Street as well as the moun- 
tains, I would pause for a digression on the Little 
City That Takes Itself Seriously. Maybe I will 
anyway. No one dislikes the eternal booster any 
more than I do, not even Rudyard Kipling or Sin- 
clair Lewis ; no one is more easily bored with smug- 
ness and commonplace self-satisfaction (it is my 
brand of smugness to think so!). Yet I liked 
Bend, I went off for a two-day camping trip with 
its chief booster, I sang lustily in chorus with a 
hundred and fifty others, at a public dinner, a song 
to the tune of " John Brown's Body," with the 
Pollyannaish refrain : 



168 SKYLINE CAMPS 

I am satisfied with Oregon, 
I am satisfied with Oregon, 
I am satisfied with Oregon, 
The good old webfoot State. 

And the only persons I encountered who bored me 
and annoyed me were certain lumber magnates from 
eastern cities (and their wives), there because the 
gTeat sawmill was there — there, in other words, to 
exjiloit the land, and scornful of its real people, its 
real s]3irit. I felt toward the wives of these men 
exactly as Main Street felt toward Carol Kennicott 
— and I gloried in it! The trouble with Carol 
was that she was a little egotistical fool, who had no 
real vision, no real culture. She had no sympathy 
or love for her fellow creatures. 

Bend, to be sure, wears the standard American 
clothes, goes to the standard American movies, buys 
the standard American popular magazines, and 
even tolerates a barytone who sings " The Rosary " 
in public. The domestic architecture is hideous — 
though not so hideous as ours was in the East but 
a generation ago, and still is in many industrial 
towns and on the fringes of large cities. I think it 
highly unlikely that psj^choanalysis, the latest im- 
personation by Geraldine Farrar, the plays of John 
Galsworthy, " expressionism " in art, or even the 
theory of relativity, are widely discussed at Bend 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 109 

tea parties. However, there have been times when 
I, myself, have found other topics more intriguing. 
Bend — and of course I use Bend as a symbol of 
hundreds of small cities and towns in those parts of 
the country that are growing or hope to grow — is 
most interested in the job of getting on in the 
world, which is not the highest ambition, but at least 
is characteristically American, and, after all, good 
or bad entirely according to what constitutes the 
civic conception of " getting on ". I am very much 
afraid that any would-be reformer who doesn't ac- 
cept as a necessary, indeed a basic element of the 
idea of getting on, the desire for a certain civic 
impressiveness of size, and an individual desire for 
a good house, a sure income, and the social security 
that goes with these things, is doomed to perpetual 
disappointment. But when the civic idea of getting 
on means also wide, clean, well-paved streets, when 
it means setting aside (as so many western towns 
have done, and so few eastern) a large section of the 
most attractive land in the community for a public 
park, in anticipation of growth, when it means a 
cheerful spirit of cooperation and an almost total 
lack of dumb withdrawal into the individual shell, 
letting somebody else do the work, then it seems to 
me there is hope, there is something to work with. 
And it is a something not alwaj^s, alas! to be found 



170 SKYLINE CAMPS 

in those beautiful old New England towns which 
Carol hankered to imitate. 

When Ivipling landed in the Northwest, many 
years ago, he found nothing that pleased him excej)t 
a Chinook salmon. He was especially annoyed 
with the " booster ", almost as annoyed as some of 
us have been at his eternal boosting for British 
imperialism. There is, of course, a type of booster 
who is a terrible bore, and he is especially to be 
encountered at Rotary Club luncheons, all across 
the continent. But, after all, the average booster 
in the Little City That Takes Itself Seriously is 
not of this stamp. In the first place, he is too naif, 
and in the second place, he has a sense of humor. 
He knows Bend is not so big as New York, and he 
knows you know it. But if he rested on that knowl- 
edge, he would be a cynic, or a " dead one ". lie 
boosts to keep his ego, and the community ego, up 
to fighting pitch, to keep life stirring and active, to 
keep folks " on the way." Carl Sandburg, one of 
the new poets, said, " I don't know where I am 
going, but I'm on the way ". The self-satisfaction 
of the growing Main Streets is, in reality, the out- 
flowing of a feeling that they are " on the way ". 
To an easterner, from a dying community, this is 
far from being unpleasant. It is, rather, a tonic; 
it is life. 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 171 

But " on the way " where? Ah! there is the real 
rub. On the way, of course, to the goal of all good 
Americans — " success ", size, prosperity. Whose 
fault is this? Don't blame Main Street, blame 
America. Bend kowtows, so far as I could see, to 
just one thing — the great sawmill which employs 
so many men, which keeps the railroad busy, which 
means so much to the prosperity of the place. And 
that sawmill is what? It is j)rivilege, land monop- 
oly. Set before Bend, and all the other Main 
Streets, the goal of abolishing that privilege, and 
making the sawmill not a fickle master (that will 
depart when the forest is all destroyed), but a ser- 
vant to work for the people forever, and you would 
put them " on the way " to something that could 
utilize all the booster spirit, all the neighborliness 
and cooperative good-will. It is something larger 
than Carol Kennicott's vision of a pure Georgian 
schoolhouse, and to achieve it will take something 
more than Carol's patience and persuasion and tol- 
erance of human dullness and conservatism. 

I ought to add that the Bend booster, who took 
me camping and fishing far up on Newberry Crater, 
when he got me there backed me into a pile of lava 
fragments whence there was no escape, and read 
to me a motion-picture scenario. In New York, no 
doubt, it would have been a play. But nobody in the 



172 SKYLINE CAMPS 

Northwest (or the Southwest, or large portions of 
the Middle West, and the South) ever sees a play. 
It was a scenario about the older Oregon of Mc- 
Laughlin and Fremont, and it wasn't written to 
" boost " anything. It was written out of a great 
love for this state, for its picturesque history, for 
its scenic beauties, an attempt to put some of these 
things honestly into the only dramatic medium 
which has any validity on Main Street, the motion 
picture. Would Carol, I wonder, have scorned it 
because it was not a drama in blank verse? I think 
our scorn should rather be for the entire nation, 
which permits its films to be debauched into the 
tragic trash which is now broadcast over the land. 

But at this rate I shall never get to Minto 
Pasture, certainly not if I permit myself another 
digression, on the subject of motion pictures. I 
have probably quite forgotten to say that looking 
west from Bend you see, perhaps thirty or forty 
miles away, but af)parently close by, the splendid 
snow-covered pyramids of the Three Sisters, ten- 
thousand-foot mountains perpetually reminding 
you of the high trails they sentinel. And your 
Oregon Main Street very speedily becomes a high 
trail, after all — a fact which the average Oregonian 
does not forget. His mountains are not only close 
to him, they are dear to him, and he turns to them, 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 173 

and deep into them, at every possible opj)ortunity. 
From Bend it was our plan to strike in to Mount 
Jefferson, and attempt an ascent, if conditions per- 
mitted. There was no certainty that we could even 
reach the usual base for the climb, because of the 
snow, and we could find no one who laiew of any 
other way up. The only certainty was that the 
mountain couldn't be climbed at all from the east. 
With this delightful uncertainty flavoring the trip 
with adventure, we rose one morning at an un- 
earthly hour, breakfasted at an all-night lunch 
counter, and sped away up the road just as the sun 
was rising over the world rim, and the jack-rabbits, 
through with their night's feeding, were scooting 
across the highway seeking cover in the sage brush. 
The road was smooth and hard, and we tore along 
with the hares flying out of our path like snow be- 
fore a rotary plow. Ahead of us, in the crystal air 
of dawn, the sentinel white peaks stood up above 
the blue range in shining glory, from the Three 
Sisters in our path, past Washington and Three 
Fingered Jack, to the splendid, symmetrical, sharp 
cone of Jefferson, our goal, and then, almost a 
hundred miles away to the northward, but beauti- 
ful and tremendous, the white temple of Oregon's 
gods, the Fuji of America — Mount Hood. 

We were bearing northwestward now, through 



174 SKYLINE CAMPS 

wheat raised by the heart-breaking process of dry 
farming, through sage brush, through scattered 
groves of junipers, most ancient looking of trees, 
then at last into the yellow-pine forests again, by a 
road that was but a track winding between coppery 
trunks. Forty or fifty miles, and we pulled up in 
the heart of the forest, at the base of a fine, sym- 
metrical, eight-thousand-foot, forested dome called 
Black Butte, and beside a cool and rushing stream. 
Here, in a small clearing, surrounded by a rough, 
weathered picket fence, was the house of the United 
States Forest Ranger for the district. Facing the 
house was his barn. And in the paddock were 
seventeen horses awaiting us. We unpacked the 
cars, and ran them into the barn, bidding them a 
cheerful goodbye. They are useful things, but the 
high trails start where their usefulness ceases, and 
there is nothing about them anyAvhere, at any time, 
which can match the thrill of a live horse beneath 
you. 

It took what was left of the morning to get our 
train packed and saddled, and I had time to exj)lore 
a little along the banks of the Metolius River, the 
stream which pours up out of two or three huge 
springs not far away and flows past the ranger 
station a steady volume of marvelous cold water. 
I hadn't gone a hundred feet away from the road 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 175 

and the bridge before I came upon one of the finest 
clumps of Jacob's ladder {yolemonium occidentale) 
which I ever saw. To be sure, I have not seen 
many. It is a wild flower that grows in the East, 
but only in favored sections. I know of none in 
the Berkshires, though it is found in Vermont, and 
in parts of New York. The clumps by the Metolius 
were so close to the water's edge that the outer stems 
hung over the stream. Each plant was two feet 
across, and at least equally tall, with copious spraj'^s 
of the lovely, phlox-like blue or purplish flowers. 
The w^hole plant, in its method of growth, its odd, 
prett}^ arrangement of little leaves like ladder rungs 
up the stems, and its flowers, delicate in shape and 
color and with the added charm of paler blue vein- 
ings, a bright yellow eye, and long, protruding 
stamens and pistil, and in its affinity for cool stream- 
sides, is a thing of rare beauty. No garden which 
possesses a pool or brook or moist corner should be 
without it. Here by the bank of the Metolius I 
stayed so long admiring it that I scarcely had time 
to notice the great variety of plants and flowers 
flourishing in that favored spot, some of them com- 
plete strangers to me, before I was summoned to 
do my share in the packing. I shall never be quite 
happy till I get back there, to spend a week, or a 
month, beside that crystal stream, in the profound 



176 SKYLINE CAMPS 

and fragrant peace of the pine forest, in a climate 
where all summer long it never rains, and you can 
go off for a day and a night with your coffee i^ot 
and blanket roll, in perfect security, and in a spot 
where every day brings its wealth of new wild 
flowers making gardens of every glade. 

At last we swung off up the trail, with fifteen 
miles to make that afternoon, and all of us, except 
the guide and his helper, saddle shj^ We were 
headed through the pine woods, directty toward the 
Cascade Divide. Here, in the national forest, the 
value of fire protection was startlingly apparent, 
for not only was the forest floor sown thickly with 
seedling pines, but in the clearings of old fire scars 
the young trees were shooting up twenty or thirty 
feet. The undergrowth, also, was much more 
varied and luxurious, insuring a slower evaporation. 
The trail, however, was choking with dust, for the 
soil is everywhere of the same volcanic nature, and 
here conditions were aggravated because a band of 
sheep had been recently driven over. However, the 
subject of sheep in our western mountains is some- 
thing else that tempts me to a digression which 
would too long delay our arrival at Minto Pasture. 
I must heroically refrain. I will say, though, that 
some day we shall wake up, as a nation, to realize 
that one old New England pasture will support 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 177 

more sheep than an Oregon mountainside, which 
will result in improving the New England pastures, 
the Oregon mountainsides, and the condition of 
nearly everybody's purse. 

A pass over the Oregon Cascade Divide is quite 
a different matter from a pass over the Continental 
Divide in the Rockies. In the first place, the whole 
formation of the range is different. It is a series of 
parallel waves of wooded mountains, many miles 
across, cut by innumerable erosion canons in va- 
rious directions, and seldom is the average height 
over five thousand or at most six thousand feet. 
The actual Divide is woven back and forth over the 
ridges and plateaus. Out of this range, at irregular 
intervals, sometimes fifty miles apart, sometimes 
much closer, rise the snow-clad cones of the major 
volcanoes. Mount Hood is the most northerly, 
thirty miles down from the Columbia River gorge. 
The next is Mount Jefferson, seventy miles south 
of Hood. Jefferson is 10,523 feet high. There is 
no other outstanding peak for about twenty miles, 
when the odd, sharply spiked spires of Three Fin- 
gered Jack rise up 7,792 feet. The trail we were 
following crossed the Divide just north of Three 
Fingered Jack. We climbed steadily, but not 
steeply, through a forest of diminishing height, but 
increasing interest, for the yellow pines gave way to 



178 SKYLINE CAMPS 

a great variety of trees, including specimens of the 
beautiful incense cedar, and a variety of shrubs, 
too. We had no sight, however, of our goal, JNIount 
Jefferson, and on the Divide itself there was little 
suggestion of high mountains, for at this point it is a 
considerable heavily forested plateau, whereon all 
trace of dust had disappeared, and we climbed over 
snowdrifts or sloshed through pools where the drifts 
had just melted. Once we stopped to rest by a 
wild little lake, in a cirque of broken lava, sur- 
rounded by paintbrush blooms, and reflecting just 
the spires of Three Fingered Jack beyond. 

It was getting dusky when we began to go down- 
hill again, but we could plainly see a change in the 
vegetation. We were on the west side of the Divide, 
where the clouds from the Pacific strike and con- 
dense. The trees w^re thicker together, and taller. 
The yellow pines had vanished. There were many 
great cedars, and hosts of spring beauties on the 
ground — as if, in July, we were going back into our 
own eastern Maytime. There were ferns, too, and 
moss on the stones, giving to the woods a quality of 
home. When we reached Marion Lake, and 
trotted down through the trees to the shore, the 
forest was dark behind us, and it was only by look- 
ing out on the water that Ave were assured there was 
yet day, though none too much. Our tents were 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 179 

hastily pitched, and if it had not been for the 
pneumatic sleeping bags, we should have spent an 
uncomfortable night. 

It was, however, a delightful camp. The lake 
was framed from our tent doors by great tree boles, 
and directly across the lake rose the steep lava spires 
of Three Fingered Jack, their bases white with 
snow. There was a moon that night, full out over 
the water, and under its magic the mountain became 
some great strange castle in a dream, and the golden 
moon-path on the water was the luring road to the 
castle gates. We were not alone on the lake, either. 
Other campers were a few hundred yards away. 
We could see the red gleam of their fire through 
the forest, and hear snatches of their songs, which 
came pleasantly to our ears — from this distance. 
They were the last human beings we were to see 
or hear for a week. 

The next morning we packed and saddled early, 
anxious to get the horses to some better pasturage — 
the question of forage being a serious one in the 
Cascades. The trail took us at first over a broken 
but spring-dampened ledge of rock at a considerable 
height above the lake, with the timber coming down 
from above close to the path. And here, at the 
very start of the day, we had our first floral thrill — 
the so-called " Mount Hood lilj^ " — that is, it is the 



180 SKYLINE CAMPS 

Mount Hood lily in Oregon; officially, it is the 
Ulium Wusliingtonianum, or Washington lily. It 
grows from California to the Columbia, at altitudes 
of from three thousand to seven thousand feet, in 
rich soil and partial forest shade, often, also, as 
above Marion Lake, protected by shrubbery. The 
stems rose, in these specimens we now first saw, 
about three feet, rather thick, purplish stems, with 
many whorls of rippling and highly polished glossy 
leaves. Each stem bore at the top anywhere from 
three to ten (in one or two specimens even more) 
wonderful lilies, three or four inches across, with 
petals divided to the base and spreading wide apart, 
with yellow anthers and green pistils. The buds 
and the freshly opened flowers were virgin white; 
they were like Easter in the woods. But the older 
blooms, even before they showed any signs of with- 
ering, had turned to lavender. Those which were 
plainly past their prime were almost purple. And 
their fragrance! All lilies have a certain charac- 
teristic odor, but this one adds a rich and yet delicate 
perfume of its own, suggesting, as much as any- 
thing, a carnation, but a carnation spiced with the 
smell of forests. There must have been twenty or 
thirty stalks of these wonderful flowers along the 
moist ledge, and all but two of them we left. The 
rest of the day my eyes kept traveling to right and 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 181 

left through the forest for more, yet with one or 
two solitary exceptions, conspicuous in their very 
loneliness, we saw no others. 

But how much else we encountered on that ride ! 
The morning was hardly in its stride when we 
picked our way down a long slope of broken lava, 
leading into a heavily timbered canon, and entered 
that timber to gasp in amazement. Every one, I 
suppose, gasps with amazement when he first rides 
into a major stand of Douglas fir. The thing is 
incredible, overwhelming. I don't know how tall 
these trees were — two hundred and fifty feet, I pre- 
sume. They looked as high as the Washington 
Monument. It was surely a hundred feet to the 
lowest limbs. Their trunks at the base were at 
least ten feet thick, and the great brown scales of 
elephantine bark looked old as the very soil of the 
forest. But most wonderful was the density of 
the stand. There must have been fifteen of these 
giants to the acre in spots, giving a lumber footage 
that certainly explains, if it doesn't justify, the lust 
of the lumbermen to get at them. No, that was not 
the most wonderful. Most wonderful were the tiny 
gardens at their feet, gardens of little twin flowers 
where the sun struck in, growing up in confident 
masses right between the huge root-toes of the 
giants. 



182 SKYLINE CAMPS 

We rode for several miles down the canon, wind- 
ing our way through the sun and shadow of these 
majestic brown columns, pygmies at their feet; and 
riding purposely at the rear, I watched the golden 
sunlight splash on the canvas coverings over the 
pack horses' loads, or the heads of the leaders go out 
of sight around some vast trunk — a perpetual play 
of light and shade, an unconscious pageant of the 
forest trail. 

We lunched at the foot of the canon, where the 
horses found pasture, and we let them feed for two 
hours or more. Then we struck up a little-used side 
trail, headed eastward (we had been traveling north 
all the morning) , and presently came into a great 
clearing which was probably caused by a forest fire. 
At any rate, the entire steep mountain wall con- 
fronting us was covered only with scrub second 
growth and dense shrubbery, the slick ear bush pre- 
vailing. This wall was so extremely steep that 
it seemed unlikelj^ the trail went up it. For my 
horse's sake, I hoped that it didn't, for the day was 
excessively warm, and the horses were hot, tired, and 
still underfed. However, it did. It was a forest- 
ranger trail, made with the least expenditure of 
money, too, so that the switchbacks followed a grade 
much nearer thirty per cent, than the standard 
twelve per cent, of the national parks. Panting, 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 183 

sweating, and with wheezing gasps and snorts, the 
horses toiled upward, the poor pack beasts having 
to be coaxed and sworn at. The chmb was a mat- 
ter of four or five miles, and rests were frequent 
and necessary. Soon we were up where we could 
see over the canon below into the tumbled, rolling 
ranges to the west, but a wall still blocked the whole 
eastward view. Indeed, the sun was already almost 
resting on the western ranges when we began to pull 
easier, over a lessening grade. The sun was on the 
western ranges, and sending our shadows far out 
to the eastward, when we broke suddenly out of a 
patch of firs and shrubs, into a forty-acre lush green 
pasture, which domed up gently ahead of us against 
the pearly east. 

And then we stopped, and the horses stopped, 
though not for the same reason. The horses 
plunged their noses into the tall, cool, succulent 
grass. We plunged our eyes into it, and sent them 
roving over it, for here was a garden sown by the 
gods in their happiest hour. 

Five varieties were used to plant these forty 
acres. First grass, which had to grow tall and 
slender for its life, because it was sown amid an 
infinite number of fern brakes, of a uniform height, 
freshly gi-een and graceful. Those two plants, 
grass and brake, made the green carpet and the 



184 SKYLINE CAMPS 

spray foliage for the flowers. The flowering plants 
were deep blue larkspur (the type flower of our 
annual delphiniums in eastern gardens), lighter 
blue mountain lupine, and scarlet gilia. Imagine 
forty acres of doming green, its texture feathered 
fern and plumed or lance-like grass, and all stained 
and patterned blue and red, the blue pure shades of 
the sky, the red a coral scarlet. Such was the gar- 
den we had entered, just as the sunset shadows, 
pursuing us up the slope, reached our feet, and the 
cool breath of the summit spaces greeted us. 

But the end was not yet. Tugging our horses' 
heads up out of the ferns and grass, and driving in 
the pack horses, we moved on through the blue and 
scarlet, up the dome to the skyline. And, as we 
crested that skyline, the full loveliness of Minto 
Pasture burst finally upon us. For just above the 
first forty acres is another and larger natural pas- 
ture, almost level, in which, instead of fern brake, 
thousands of plants of Indian hellebore rose 
straight and tall amid the grass, as backing for the 
blue and scarlet; and, in addition to the three 
flowers of the lower pasture, here the ground was 
thickly sown with white mariposa lilies, peeping up 
at you below the grass tops or the other plants, 
when you looked down around your feet. 

But that was not all. The eastern edge of the 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 185 

garden was lined with a few scattered fir trees, and 
then fell away into a hollow. Bej'^ond this hollow 
were visible the ghost-gray tops of dead trees in a 
fire scar, and then, not a dozen miles away, and 
looking hardly a mile, the great white pyramid of 
Mount Jefferson, solitary and majestic, heaving its 
snow-fields, pink with sunset, up against the twi- 
light east ! For two long days it had been our goal, 
and for two long days we had not seen it, not since 
we left the plain just out of Bend. Then it was 
many miles away. Now we were close upon it, and 
it burst into our vision alone, without a single rival, 
dominating the entire eastern sky, and seeming 
almost to rise out of a great bed of lupine and lark- 
spur, of scarlet gilia and white mariposas. The 
sun had sunk behind us, and the western ranges 
were filled with a purple light like some strange 
brilliant vapor flooding their canons. Only on the 
higher snow-fields of the great mountain now did 
the direct rays linger ; then they, too, lost their flash 
and sparkle, lost their amethyst flush, and stood 
chilly cold and white against the dusking sky. 

Hardly an hour before we were sweltering up the 
trail ; now we shivered as we set hastily about pitch- 
ing camp. The main camp was set up beside a 
rough little cabin once used by the forest rangers, 
and just above a fine great spring in the ravine to 



186 SKYLINE CAMPS 

the east. But my wife and I took our tent some 
distance away, into a grove of firs, and hung it so 
that the opening faced Mount Jefferson. To 
gather fuel was simx3le, for dead wood abounds in a 
spot so storm-SAvept as Minto Mountain in winter. 
The horses were turned out into the pasture, their 
bells ringing madly as they leaped with clumsy 
haste on hobbled feet from one rich tuft to another. 
Warmed again by the exertion of pitching tents 
and blowing up the sleeping bags, and by our thick- 
est sweaters, we finally sat down to supper by 
lantern light, as close to the stove as we could 
get. The altitude Avas about fifty-five hundred 
feet, and the thermometer at nine o'clock, on July 
eighteen, read thirty-eight degrees. We spent lit- 
tle time that evening in merry talk around the camp 
fire. Instead, we crawled in between our blankets. 
After I had blown out the lantern in our tent and 
snuggled down, I could hear the soft fall of the 
overflow from the spring in the ravine, the occa- 
sional tinkle of a cow bell on one of the horses, and 
the thud of his feet as he hobbled from place to 
place, the song of the pine surges in the trees over- 
head as a night wind cruised past, and far off and 
infinitely mournful, the howl of a coyote. 

Our camp on Minto Mountain was almost too 
pleasant to abandon after a single night, so we spent 




Mt. Jefferson from Grizzly Lake. One of America's Must Beautiful 
and Most Difficult Mountains 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 187 

the following day traversing the six miles or more 
of fire scar between its pastured summit and the 
deep ravine at the immediate base of Jefferson, to 
study the mountain Avith binoculars. Between our 
camp and the wall of this ravine, which is called 
Hunt's Cove, lay first a descent through dead but 
standing timber, where the ground was thickly 
sown with Indian basket grass, as lovely and fra- 
grant, but not so tall as in the Rockies, and then a 
wide, comparatively level stretch of broken country 
SAvept clean by the fire and only beginning to re- 
clothe itself with verdure. This stretch is known as 
Grizzly Flats, possibly because the grizzly is about 
the rarest quadruped in the Cascade Mountains. 
Almost in its centre is a small brown tarn, but a few 
feet deep and nearly circular in shape, which is sur- 
rounded by magenta heather, and holds on its sur- 
face as in a mirror the perfect reflection of Mount 
Jefferson. On the damp margin of this tarn, too, 
I found several beautiful, tall specimens of the 
shooting star {dodecatkeon pauciflorum) , a quaint 
and lively little flower which spits its yellow centre 
earthward from its red petals, like a falling rocket. 
At the western rim of Hunt's Cove the snow had 
but just melted in the open, and was still several 
feet deep in the woods. All down the cove sides the 
drifts lay, and on the cove bottom, eight hundred 



188 SKYLINE CAMPS 

feet below, and then on up and up till they merged 
with the everlasting snows of the mountain. From 
this point, which is just at the southwest angle of 
the great pyramid, you see the entire west wall of 
the mountain from its very base in the timbered 
ravine. We also could see, in the depth of snow, 
why our guide had brought us up over INIinto to 
this place, instead of keeping on northward to Jef- 
ferson Park, at the northwest angle, where the 
ascent is generally based. A long study of the 
slopes that faced us across the cove, however, con- 
vinced our mountaineer that there was a practicable 
way up from Hunt's Cove — if we could get the 
horses down into Hunt's Cove. Of course, the trail 
was buried in drifts, and these drifts hung at an 
angle of forty-five degrees. The guide said he 
could do it, and we agreed to let him try — they were 
his horses ! So we rode back to our camp in Minto 
Pasture, and dug plants to carry out with us, stor- 
ing them as well as we could in tins. 

Every one is familiar, of course, with both lark- 
spur and lupine, but the scarlet gilia (gilia aggre- 
gata) is known only to those friends of mine who 
have traveled in the West — and not to all of them. 
I have never found it listed in a seed or nursery 
catalogue, so that I fancy it must be a shy and 
difficult plant to breed in domesticity. Certainly, 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 189 

if it were not, but were adaptable like its blue com- 
panions, it would be as famous as phlox or larkspur. 
In height somewhat lower than a well-established 
cardinal flower, and in color a much lighter and 
more brilliant note, its manner of growth on the 
stem nevertheless more nearly resembles our cardi- 
nal lobelia than any other flower I can think of for 
comparison. There are fewer individual flowers in 
the head, however; they are scattered more deli- 
cately on the stem, and they much more resemble 
little scarlet trumpets pointed out to the four winds. 
I have in my library two bound volumes of Paxton's 
" Magazine of Botany ", published in England in 
1834-35, by David Paxton, who evidently experi- 
mented to a large extent with the many varieties of 
seeds brought back from the Northwest by Douglas. 
He records that the scarlet gilia ( which he classifies 
as ipomopsis elegans, though Don had already 
classed it as it is placed to-day) was introduced into 
the garden of the Horticultural Society in 1827, 
but that " it is very impatient of cultivation ", tends 
suddenly to disappear without any rhyme or reason, 
and cannot stand full sunlight. (In the Cascades 
I never saw it anywhere but in full sunlight. ) An 
extraordinarily beautiful flower, is Paxton's conclu- 
sion, but the very deuce to raise. He couldn't even 
make up his mind whether it was a perennial or not. 



190 SKYLINE CAMPS 

It is now listed as both, but evidently it is no easier 
to grow outside of its native soil and setting than 
Paxton found it. Nor am I sure that this is to be 
regretted. Some, at least, of our loveliest wild 
flowers should remain forever untamed, and only 
to be seen by him who hunts them out in their nat- 
ural settings and their utmost fastnesses. I feel to- 
ward them as I feel toward a mountain; no moun- 
tain should have a road to the summit, it should be 
conquered on foot or not at all. He who cannot 
or will not climb does not deserve the freedom of 
the peak. 

We devoted most of the following day to getting 
our pack train into Hunt's Cove. Raj)idly crossing 
Grizzly Flats by the now familiar trail (one passage 
over a high trail in the wilderness endears it to you 
like a friend) , with the great mountain standing up 
white in the dazzling morning light, we began at 
once to prospect for a way down the steep wall, 
putting our horses over six- and eight-foot drifts in 
the timber, still packed so hard that they held us 
firmly up. At one spot, beside a steep wall of 
broken lava fragments, we came upon thousands of 
trillium grandiflorum in full bloom, enjoying in 
mid-July their belated spring. I have never seen 
so many together, not even in a nursery. My own 
little wild flower garden at home came into my 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 191 

memory, with its row of white trilliums scarcely 
twenty feet long, and I wondered if next spring I 
could look at them without a pang of longing for 
this garden in the wilderness. 

We worked back and forth wherever we could 
find a declivity that wasn't too steep for the animals' 
hoofs to cling to, until we were perhaps half-way 
down. Then there was no more possibility of an 
easy grade. Everywhere, to right and left, the snow 
pitched down at forty-five degrees. There was 
nothing to do but coast, and almost before us was 
a chute designed for the purpose — a clean white 
scar in the forest, made by some landslide or snow 
avalanche. It was about twenty feet wide, and led 
straight as an arrow down to the lush meadow of 
Hunt's Cove. The photographer got out his movie 
camera, and mounted it beside the chute, a hundred 
feet below the top, in order, as he explained, that 
Ave might have acquired plenty of momentum before 
we passed. The slide exactly cut the square finder 
on the diagonal from one corner to the other — 
exactly forty-five degrees of smooth snow slope! 
We sent my wife down on foot, with an alpenstock, 
through the timber, and the rest of us, leading our 
horses in single file, began the descent of the chute. 
Three steps, and the horses began to slip, and their 
hoofs to break throu2;li !:o the knees or shoulder. 



192 SKYLINE CAMPS 

They would stagger up, slip again, and make a 
lurching leap forward, bracing their forelegs to stop 
themselves. We, just ahead of them with their 
bridles, would have to leap as far as they did, or, if 
we couldn't do that, leap to one side to avoid being- 
struck. We had to keep our balance — if possible. 
As we jumped and slipped and stumbled and 
tumbled past the camera, the pack horses by this 
time all out of line and crowding down upon us in a 
mad confusion, the photographer ground his crank 
with shouts of delight, crying "Action! More 
action! " 

One of the noblest things I have ever done was to 
go back up the slope, after my frightened, trembling 
horse was tethered, and carry that man's heavy 
metal tripod down the chute for him! 

The bottom of Hunt's Cove contains a delightful 
little green meadow, ringed with tall evergreens, but 
this meadow was now streaked with drifts, and pat- 
terned with running brooks of melting snow-water. 
Where there was no brook, the ground was wet as a 
sponge, and starred with white cowslips. At the 
lower end of the meadow, however, the streams 
gathered together into a single creek, waist-deep 
and twenty feet across, which ran northward into 
the woods, and presently leaped over a ledge in a 
tumultuous waterfall. Beside this brook, and near 



FROM BEND TO MINTO PASTURE 193 

the fall, we found two or three spots bare of snow, 
and comparatively dry, and here we made our camp, 
turning the horses back into the meadow. As I 
worked pitching my tent and making the camp 
shipshape I could see the brown water of the creek 
running rapidly past, between steep, mossy banks, 
and coming down it, now half submerged, now just 
above the water, a pair of ousels. They went down, 
evidently, to the top of the falls, and then returned 
and repeated their hunt. They minded me, and 
my vigorous chopping, no more than would a pair 
of English sparrows. In the dark woods they were 
the only other living things apparent besides our- 
selves, and their presence was curiously cheering. 

That evening, by the light of a roaring fire 
which reddened the forest trunks around us, those 
of us who were to try the mountain the next day 
screwed the spikes into our boots, two dozen or 
more half-inch spikes and seven inch-and-a-quarter 
spikes in each sole and three in each heel. We got 
ready our condensed luncheon, too, and then were 
sent to bed by the leader, who himself retired with 
a small alarm clock, set, to my dismay, at 2:30! 



THE ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 




ATE July— the twentieth, to be 
exact. Dead silence in the dark 
forest at the bottom of Hunt's Cove, 
save for the roar of the waterfall and 
now and then the faint tinkle of a 
cow-bell on one of the horses back in the meadow. 
Suddenly, in the darkness, from one of the tents so 
dmily discernible that it might have been a snow- 
drift, the brrrrrrr of an alarm clock, followed by a 
shout, and the lighting of a lantern in the tent, 
which became translucent with moving shadows on 
its walls. Then a lantern lit in another tent. Pres- 
ently the lanterns came forth into the open, and 
drew together. A red fire-glow sprang up in the 
stove, two shadowy figures moved away through 
the trees to catch the horses, there was a smell of 
food, of coffee, above the musty odor of the forest 
mould just emerging from snow. 

Such must have been the impression of the scene, 
but I was in no condition to observe it. Roused 
from the abyss of sleep and shivering with cold, I 

194 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 195 

suddenly regretted that I had ever suggested an 
assault upon Mount Jefferson. I suddenly began 
to recall, too, that this was my first genuine snow 
climb. I had scaled a good many rocks, but my 
technique in snow and ice was, to say the least, 
sketchy. We were going up a bad mountain by an 
untried route. I wanted horribly to go back into 
my sleeping bag again. So much I will now con- 
fess. But it was too late to draw back, so I forced 
down the apology for a breakfast prepared in the 
gloom by the cold and sleej)y cook, and saddled my 
horse when he arrived. We tied our climbing 
boots to our saddle horns, shouldered our packs, and 
waited for the first gray streaks of dawn in the 
forest. As soon as they came we mounted and 
rode, five of us, back through the meadow, forded 
the creek, and put our horses up the steep eastern 
wall of the cove, which for the first three or four 
hundred feet was bare of snow, and too recently 
fire-swept to have anything but fallen timber on it. 
Once up on this slope, above the forest in the cove, 
the daylight was more perceptible. Overhead thin 
dawn-streamers of mist were being harried along 
by a strong west wind. At the top of the steep 
pitch we saw the mountain ahead of us, its summit 
touched with a pink aura. But between us and the 
lower edge of its permanent and naked snow-fields 



196 SKYLINE CAMPS 

lay two or three miles of scrubby timber, still half 
buried in last winter's drifts, through which we 
made our way on horseback. This snow was 
packed and frozen hard, and riding it was easy, 
except on the steep pitches, where we had to dis- 
mount and lead the horses. The dawn vapors were 
swirling almost around us when we reached timber 
line. Looking westward, over the night-filled holes 
of the canons, we could see the clouds rolling up like 
surf from the far-off Pacific. The wind was sting- 
ing cold, and I felt sorry for my horse as I tethered 
him in what shelter I could find. He was in for a 
long wait, poor beast, without fodder and without 
water. By the time the horses were attended to, 
our burdens distributed, our boots laced on, and our 
faces plastered with grease paint, daylight was full 
upon us, but we could not, of course, see the east 
because of the gi-eat wall of the mountain. 

The first of the ascent was up a long, easy 
snow-field, that led to a naked ridge of broken lava, 
coming down the mountain like a spine. We had 
been climbing but a short time when the sun came 
over the eastern horizon, invisible to us, but making 
its advent known by an effect of extraordinary 
beauty. The rushing, thin-shredded vapors, driven 
in from the west, hit the mountain around and just 
above us, and then, still traveling at high speed. 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 197 

slipi^ed like great ghostly snakes up the glittering, 
smooth incline, enveloped the summit pinnacle, and 
slid off into space, vanishing against the blue sky. 
But as the sun came above the horizon, these vapors 
rushed up and over, directly into his level rays, and 
suddenly over the whole top of the glittering peak 
above us was a swirl and spray of rainbow, now 
forming into a perfect arc, now dissolving in a 
kaleidoscope of prismatic colors, only to form again 
as some new mass of thin white vapor rushed into 
the solar bombardment. All this was three thou- 
sand feet above our heads, over a silentwasteof blue- 
shadowed, glistening snow and desolate, naked lava. 
The display lasted for perhaps ten minutes, as we 
climbed steadily toward our first objective. Then, 
as the sun rose higher, the angle was no longer right 
for refraction, and only colorless, dreary cloud 
wraiths swept suddenly into golden brightness 
against the blue. 

Attaining the lava spine which comes down the 
mountain toward the southwest, we could pretty 
well see the work which lay ahead of us, which was 
to traverse the western slope, heading upAvard at 
the same time, and ascend a high spine which ran 
down the mountain toward the northwest. Once 
on that spine, it was apparently possible to reach 
directlv to the base of the northern end of the sum- 



198 SKYLINE CAMPS 

mit pinnacle. From here, too, we could see at last 
why it is necessary to reach the northern end of the 
pinnacle. It is only that end which is sufficiently 
inclined off the perpendicular to make the ascent 
humanly possible. Everywhere else the pinnacle 
falls down sheer for hundreds of feet, its precipices 
draped with sheets of glittering ice and hung with 
cornices of snow. Even that northern end, as I 
now saw it, rising up amid the rushing vapors, was 
not exactly reassuring. It was a long, bitter road 
to reach it, too. The sheer immensity of a moun- 
tain does not, cannot, impress you from the valley 
as it does when you are finally up on its mighty 
flanks. And here it was so cold, so silent, there 
was such a wilderness of snow up-ended in our 
faces, such a vast rotundity of sky to the utmost 
world rim, and we were so few — and so tiny! 

But our leader was not pausing for meditation. 
He uncoiled the rope, we fastened it about us, and 
listened to his crisp directions, given not in his usual 
tone but in a voice that plainly said. Do thus and 
so, or be picked up in the bottom of the canon. 
The bottom of the canon was invisible, to be sure. 
Below us the snow slope tilted for a thousand 
feet, and then ended in air — at the rim of a prec- 
ipice. Somewhere below that precipice was the 
canon ])ottom. Dropping down on the northerly 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 199 

side of the lava spine, we found the first three hun- 
dred yards of our long traverse to be over finely 
broken conglomerate, like a mixture of wood ashes 
and coarse gravel, hung on a slope so steep that it 
was poised just at the angle of repose. It is sick- 
eningly treacherous footing, when there is nothing 
to stop you if the slide once starts. Plant your 
feet down too hard, or drive in your alpenstock too 
energetically, and you feel under you that same 
horrid slip and give of breaking ice. We breathed 
much freer when we reached the snow. 

That snow, to be sure, was also tilted at an angle 
of fifty degrees, shooting downward in a great, 
Avidening dazzle, and it was frozen so hard that the 
foot. would not drive into it. Our leader took his 
little scout ax from its sheath, and using it with 
his left hand while driving home his alpenstock 
with his right, and carrying, too, a big camera and 
plates on his back, stooped briskly forward, cutting 
every step we took. For the benefit of the unin- 
itiated, I will explain that in snow climbing, when 
the partj^ is roped, half of the number must have 
their alpenstocks driven firmly into the snow while 
the other half step forward one step. Then, as 
these make their step and drive their stocks home, 
the first members pull their stocks out and take 
their forward stride. The process is not so def- 



200 SKYLINE CAMPS 

initely separated as that ; it looks more like unified 
motion. But that is the principle. The rope, be- 
tween two people, must never be so taut that it 
yanks, or you might be twitched off your balance; 
but it must never be so slack that it could entangle 
any one, or that any one could get a good start 
before the others held him. Now, to advance in 
this way, and maintain any speed and rhythm, it 
is absolutely necessary that you drive your stock 
deep into the snow till it grips firm, with a single 
motion, and that you pull it out, also, at the 
right time and with a single motion. If you 
have to stop and tug, or if you have to 
shift your balance for a brace, you delay the 
party, you break up the fifty-fifty rhythm necessary 
to insure safety, and you may even upset your own 
footing (which is on a tiny little notch the size of 
your boot-sole, cut into some thousands of acres of 
up-ended snow crust or ice!). So, if you have 
never tried it, you may suppose that you climb with 
your legs. But after you have actually climbed for 
an hour, you will say that you do it almost entirely 
with your back and shoulders. How that alpen- 
stock will embed itself! Your feet are not braced 
together, either, but one is thirty inches ahead of 
the other, and can be put nowhere else, at the 
moment when you must tug your stock out with a 




^1 




'Mtwi'.inii,.J<i"Wi ■« 



Crossing a Dangerous Rock Chute on the Great Western Traverse 
of Mt. Jefferson, (Photographed by the Author) 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 201 

single motion, and not lose your stride, not fall out 
of the rhythm of the march. You may always 
have known why the good mountain climber needs 
a weak head, but now you first truly realize why 
he needs also a strong back. 

We had five snow traverses to make, separated 
by lava spines, or islands, before the main traverse 
was reached. On the last of these lesser snow 
slopes, which was perhaps one hundred and fifty 
yards across, we saw something that we did not like. 
This particular rift of snow led directly uj), at an 
ever-increasing steepness, to the very base of the 
western precipice of the pinnacle. Starting at the 
foot of the pinnacle and swooping down the centre 
of the white rift, past us and on down, down, till 
they ended at the top of the canon wall far below, 
were two shining, smooth chutes, almost as cleanly 
cut and certainly as arrow-straight as if they had 
been dug for some insane and suicidal toboggan 
slide. They were ploughed, of course, by the 
fragments of ice and lava cascaded off the pinnacle, 
and we could, without great effort, imagine the 
speed those fragments would have attained by the 
time they reached the point of our crossing. In 
fact, without great effort, we could not help imagin- 
ing this — at least, I couldn't. On reaching the 
first of these chutes, we found it four feet deep and 



202 SKYLINE CAMPS 

six or eight feet wide. The leader cut steps into 
it and across, while number two played him out on 
the rope, and the rest of us kept our smoked 
goggles fixed on the pinnacle above. Nothing 
happened, however. The sun had not yet reached 
that side of the precipices, and nothing had been 
loosened. On the return — but that was a long 
way off. 

When we crossed the last lava spine, and reached 
the main snow-field which cuts down the west face 
of the mountain, we saw two more chutes, out in its 
centre, larger than those we had just crossed. But 
beyond them rose the great northwest shoulder, 
dazzlingly white now in the full sun, and its apparent 
nearness gave me my second wind — or my second 
back, rather. Once on that shoulder, I thought, 
our troubles would end for a time. Its slope 
toward the pinnacle certainly looked easy. So out 
we went, five little black ants, tied together with a 
hair, across the great white da-zzle, chopping every 
step, and edging upward steadily. The two chutes 
here were over six feet deep, and the bottoms of 
them were polished like a toboggan slide, though 
they had not reached the basic ice (if, indeed, there 
is a dead glacier underneath this snow-field) . The 
traverse was perhaps a quarter of a mile across, and 
then, after a brief rest on a little brown lava island 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 203 

in the waste of snow, and a fresh apphcation of 
grease pamt to our faces, lips, and necks, for 
ah'eady the dazzle was beginning to blister, we 
started up the side of the spine, to reach its crest. 

It was at this point that, for a few horrible 
moments, I began to doubt my possession of a weak 
head. That much of a mountaineer's equipment I 
had fondly supposed was mine ; but when we began 
to go up a snow wall so steep that to drive in your 
ali^enstock anew you had to lift it over your head, 
and the snow glare was only a foot from your face, 
while below you — if you looked down — you saw 
only the top of the hat on the man beneath you on 
the rope, and then — nothing, well, at that point I 
had an attack of imagination. I have never had 
one on a rock precipice. Presumably the novice's 
distrust of the strange footing, a footingtraditionally 
slipperj'^ and insecure, had much to do with it. But 
almost as much, I think, was due to the overwhelm- 
ing cold majesty of the world about me, the glitter- 
ing pinnacle above, the tremendous snow-field, the 
endless wilderness of blue canon-holes and billow- 
ing mountains far below, the utter silence. It was 
the very stupendousness of the thing we were 
doing, the audacity of our effort, that sent my heart 
down into my boots. 

However, the leader was steadily mounting, step 



204 SKYLINE CAMPS 

by step, working his ax in front of his face. I 
could see the long, cruel spikes on his boot soles as 
I looked up. And there was nothing for me to do 
but to mount also. 

That pitch of perpendicular was, I should guess, 
about three hundred feet. It brought us out on a 
razorback of snow, with a little lava island thrust 
uj) through it, where we rested and ate. It was 
now after one o'clock, and the chill of the morning 
had departed. The sun, which had made our eyes 
smart even through our goggles when the snow was 
so close to our faces, was now hot, and the wind had 
died almost entirely down. Our instrument 
showed an altitude of ninety-tAvo hundred 
feet. It was, then, but a thousand feet or so up the 
spine to the base of the pinnacle. But alas ! noth- 
ing can be so deceptive as a mountain. What had 
looked like an easy grade from below we now saw 
was actually at a sharp angle. The leader had cut 
every step from six o'clock till after one, and if he 
had to cut up this next stretch, there was small hope 
of getting to the top of the pinnacle. It turned out 
that he didn't have to, the snow having softened up 
here in the full sunlight ; but even so, the ascent was 
so slow, and the inclination so steep, calling for a 
descent backwards a good part of the way, that the 
best we could do was ten thousand feet, where a 



Li^irsla^' 






^?!^^7^;¥.ji. 





A Rare Photograph of the Summit Cone of Mt. Jefferson, Taken from 

about 10,000 Feet. The Foreground Snow is Actually Inclined 45°. 

The Ascent of the Cone has to be Made on the Left-hand Edge 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 205 

photograph of the summit pinnacle was taken. To 
climb that pinnacle, under the best of conditions, 
the leader said (by which I gathered that he del- 
icately implied five skilled men on the rope instead 
of one), required an hour and a half up and an 
equal time down. If we tried it, we would not get 
down to our packs on the spine before six, at the 
earliest. We couldn't possibly reach the horses by 
daylight — and he, for one, had no stomach to de- 
scend our tracks in the dark, nor to spend the night 
on the mountain. So, reluctantly, we turned our 
backs on those final five hundred feet of snow and 
ice, glittering virgin white in the sky, and began 
the descent. No, that is incorrect. We didn't 
turn our backs upon the pinnacle; we continued 
half to face it, for we had to descend with a side- 
ways motion for safety on the incline. 

It was four o'clock when we reached our packs 
again, rested briefly, and began the precipitous drop 
to the main traverse. I had no second attack of 
imagination, however, and thoroughly enjoyed it. 
The technique of such a descent, in snow, is easily 
mastered and has a pronounced rhythm. Standing 
sideways to the slope, with your stock driven home, 
j^ou swing your inner leg back and then down to 
the next step, pull out your stock and drive it home 
a step lower, drop your other foot to the same step. 



206 SKYLINE CAMPS 

and repeat. As you look between your two arms, 
your hands grasping the stock, to see where your 
foot is going, you see not only the step you aim for, 
but below that the head and shoulders of the next 
man on the rope. Below him, perhaps, you see the 
top of another hat, and then, far down, the glisten 
of the snow-field sliding away to the shadow-filled 
hole of the canon. Firm as you now know these 
snow steps to be, confident as you are in your stock 
and your spikes, they seem, in their whiteness, 
curiously insubstantial, and you have a sensation of 
being suspended in air. Once your nerves are ac- 
customed to it, the sensation is as pleasantly thrill- 
ing as it is curious. 

Out on the great traverse we found the rock 
chutes both widened and deepened since morning. 
Something had been down, without a doubt. 
Indeed, we were not fifty feet beyond the second 
one, when above us M^e heard a sharp snap, a roar, 
and then a rushing. We saw the fragment of rock 
fall from the pinnacle and disappear. For a second 
we wondered if it would reappear, not in the chute, 
but on the snow, in the line with us. But almost in- 
stantly we caught the smoke of it in the chute, and a 
few seconds later, with considerably less speed than 
we had expected, the snow being soft, a piece of 
lava the size of a hogshead shot down the ditch we, 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 207 

a moment before, had been climbing through. We 
went on, cheerfully speculating whether there would 
have been time to j^ank a man out of the chute after 
that first crack of warning from above, and also get 
the rope clear. We decided there would be^ — ample. 
A couple of seconds, perhaps, to spare. 

As we reached the lava on the southern side of 
the main traverse, we paused and looked back. 
Stretching away from us, across the great expanse 
of the slope, was a tiny dotted line — the little steps 
we had cut. This line ran directly to the precipi- 
tous shoulder of the spine, and then went straight up 
it. But now, as the low sun struck in on the moun- 
tain, the shadow of a lava spire on that shoulder was 
thrown blue along the upper face of the snow cliff, 
creating a perfect illusion of an overhang. Our 
little footprints went up the dazzling precipice half 
way, and then they curved outward and crawled 
right up around a great blue cornice! It looked as 
if we had climbed, like flies, inverted, to get to the 
top. Even our guide was struck by the illusion. 
As for me, I gasped once, and then I exclaimed 
(so they tell me) , " It ain't true! " 

From this point on, across the remaining trav- 
erses, our pace was slow, because some of us — mean- 
ing myself, chiefly — were tiring and could not ex- 
tract our alpenstocks with the trained rapidity of 



208 SKYLINE CAMPS 

our powerful leader. Yet we knew that we were in 
a race with darkness, and once safely over the 
treacherous slope of conglomerate and out on the 
loAver and gentler southwestern snow slope, where 
we could separate at last, we skidded and slid down- 
wards, each for himself, our boots sinking knee- 
deep into soft, wet snow which that morning had 
been almost ice. Only once did we pause, arrested 
by the glory of the sunset pouring its rose and ame- 
thyst floods of haze into the canons below us. A 
hasty photograph, and we went on again. 

As we drew near the horses at timber line, the 
poor creatures neighed their impatience to be off, 
their hunger and thirst. But it was too late to ride 
them. An aid in the morning, they were a nui- 
sance now. We could lead them faster down 
through the soft snow and the dusking woods than 
we could ride them, and we did not even want to 
spare the time to change our boots. Tugging at 
the bridles, for a horse goes reluctantly down a soft- 
snow slope, we plunged into the chill of the upland 
forest, sinking to our knees or deeper in the snow, 
with the sunset glories fading fast, and dusk creep- 
ing in upon us. By the time we reached the head 
wall of the cove it was almost full night, and we 
had to pick our way down over and around the 
fallen timber, tugging and swearing at ourreluctant 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 209 

horses, barking our shins, slipi)ing, falling. In the 
forest at the bottom was pitch-black night. Camp 
was still half a mile away, and a creek and two 
dozen brooks and bogs between. I sloshed through 
six or eight of them, and then I mounted my horse, 
spikes or no spikes, and let him do the wading. 

Ten minutes later we forded the creek close to 
camp, and suddenly saw, through the dark shadows, 
the great red glow of a fire. A moment later, and 
we were before it, wet to the waists, our lips and 
noses scorched and blistered, our faces still thick 
with grease paint, our backs aching, and over our 
whole bodies a profound and inexpressible weari- 
ness. It was 9:30. We had been gone over 
eighteen hours, we had wasted no time on the way — 
and we had not reached the smumit. Probably 
the latter fact had something to do with our irritable 
weariness. The watchers in camp, who had ex- 
pected us before daylight was gone, had been ner- 
vous, even alarmed, for two hours. But dinner was 
waiting, and all along one side of a huge fallen log 
raged a fire, in this case a safe one, since the log 
lay surrounded by snowdrifts. Once our wet cloth- 
ing was removed, and the heat of the great fire 
came to us through fresh, dry woolen, and once the 
hot coffee and the hot food were devoured, we felt 
less irritable, though not less weary. We even 



210 SKYLINE CAMPS 

mustered up enough ambition to unscrew the spikes 
from our boots, before a delicious and overpower- 
ing languor stole over us, and we tumbled into our 
sleeping bags. 

It was not until the next morning that I real- 
ized my own shortcomings the night before. My 
wife, who was quite as green at sitting below a 
snow mountain waiting for me, as I was at climbing 
it, had spent a rather dreary day, the dreariness 
passing into uneasiness when night arrived, and we 
didn't. One of my choice possessions is a book 
called " On Alpine Heights and British Crags," in 
which are numerous hair-raising illustrations, and 
under most of these illustrations you read, " On this 
slope, in 1903, two guides and five Englishmen 
slipped and fell to the glacier below " — or words 
to that effect. My wife began to think of this book. 
The thoughts were not conducive to comfort, so she 
sought the conversation of our packer, a long, lank 
Oregonian of few words. He sounded a cheerful 
note. 

" I don't see why folks wanter do this climbin'," 
he said. " Riskin' their necks just to get up some- 
where there ain't no need o' goin'. Last year a 
young feller tried to climb Three Fingered Jack. 
About half an acre come off with him. They got 
his body, though." 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 211 

Thus cheered and fortified, my wife awaited in 
the black forest of the lonely cove some sound or 
hint that we were coming. At last, she said, a faint 
halloo was heard, though I fancy it was one of us 
cursing his slow-footed and stubborn horse. At 
any rate, she stood on the edge of camp — so I 
learned the next morning — in a mood to give me 
something more than normal conjugal welcome. 
But my only words of greeting — again so I learned 
the next morning — were these: " Why haven't you 
got me out a pair of dry socks? " 

The dog-weariness of the night before, however, 
and, I trust, the ego-centric irritability, were gone 
with the new day. The only bodily reminder I 
possessed of the climb was a peeling nose, badly 
cracked lips, and eyes that still smarted. I should 
have liked nothing better than to have remained in 
camp there for three days more, so that Ave could 
take a tent, blankets, and provisions up to timber 
line that afternoon, spend the night at the edge of 
the snow-fields, and with the two hours thus gained 
on the start of the climb the following morning, and 
two hours more gained on the descent, have made 
the full route to the top of the pinnacle. How- 
ever, the three days were not ours to spend, and I 
must wait some happier future. At least, we had 
found a possible route up the mountain from 



212 SKYLINE CAMPS 

Hunt's Cove, and demonstrated that, for inexperi- 
enced climbers certainly, and probably for any 
climbers, the full route cannot be made in a day. 
With that we had to be satisfied. 

Still, it was a wrench to break that camp in the 
cove, not only because it meant abandoning the 
mountain still unsealed, but because the camp itself, 
deep in the forest by the rushing creek, was so at- 
tractive, and because it had been to us, on a memora- 
ble evening, the warmth and shelter and welcome of 
home when we were ready to the utmost for such 
warmth and shelter. The air, escaping from my 
sleeping bag as I rolled it up, was like a sigh. 

We left the cove by a different trail from the 
one we had attempted to use in entering, going di- 
rectly up the head wall, and aiming to cross the Di- 
vide just south of Jefferson. In this way we could 
get back to our motors in a day — that is, we could if 
we could get over the Divide at all. No one had 
yet made the crossing, because of the snow, though 
it was now almost August. All that morning we 
rode either through beautiful forests of fir or over 
wide, open meadows, with anywhere from a foot to 
ten feet of snow beneath our horses' hoofs. We 
had to paint our lips and wear our goggles, and it 
was a mystery how the eyes of the horses stood the 
glare. We rode, too, in our shirt sleeves, in mid- 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 213 

summer heat, through woods that looked like 
Christmas. 

Once, when we paused for a rest, before the de- 
scent to the east, I saw Jefferson for the last time 
close by me, and in all its full sweep of snow and 
lava to the glittering pinnacle. Foolish to climb 
such a mountain? Incomprehensible, the passion 
of the mountaineer which takes him up into the 
dangers of such a height? Let them talk of folly, 
I thought, who have scaled the heights, but let 
all others be silent. Up, up, into the great silences, 
the climber has gone. Over the up-ended snow- 
fields, clinging like a fly to a wall, he has cut his 
tiny steps, where no steps ever were before, per- 
haps, and where no steps will be after tomorrow's 
sun. He, the pygmy, has conquered the heights, 
he has matched wits with a mountain, he has left 
his mark, the mark of his will to conquer, the mark 
of his aspiration, on the sky -borne, eternal snows! 
As good a thing, thought I, to risk his life for as 
crossing Fifth Avenue, or helping privilege control 
the earth and the fruits thereof by means of bay- 
onets and the shibboleth of " patriotism ". Yes, 
quite as good. We plunged on down the eastern 
wall of the Divide, and slowly Mount Jefferson 
seemed to sink from sight. Then my meditations 
ended abruptly, for so did the level earth. 



214 SKYLINE CAMPS 

The drop was not great — a matter, perhaps, of 
two or three hundred feet, before the slope leveled 
out again enough to ride on. But while it lasted 
there was nothing to do but dismount and slide. 
After a week of rough going, we had gradually 
used up all the rope with which we tied the pack 
horses into a string, so we had to drive them over 
the rim and let them shift for themselves. All but 
one of them made the slide without disaster, but the 
nag who was carrying part of the bedding (fortu- 
nately, not the cameras!) lost his footing, plunged 
over with a wild snort, and turned three complete 
somersaults, before he finally came to a temporary 
rest. He rested long enough to shake off what was 
left of his load, and then he bolted, followed by 
three of his companions. After the usual manner 
of pack horses, too, he bolted in a direction at right 
angles to the trail, scrambling madly up a snowdrift 
nearly as steep as the one we had just come down. 
There was nothing to do but tether our saddle 
horses and go stalking the runaways, by climbing 
in the soft snow faster than they did, keeping be- 
hind the cover of trees, and finally outflanking 
them. I may have done hotter work, but I don't 
now recall it. 

This excitement over, we remounted in file again, 
and soon trotted out on the bank of a lovely little 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 215 

lake, high up at the end of a deep, narrow cove that 
widened and deepened away from us, toward the 
east. We were over the Divide, we were past the 
snow. Our only reminder now was the glistening 
pinnacle of Jefferson, just peering up over a ridge 
across the ravine. Under our feet the trail was 
dry and dusty. The paintbrush was in bloom — 
along this trail almost pure pink in color, a shade I 
have never seen it elsewhere. The familiar shrubs 
of the dry country were all about us, and the west- 
ern white pines {pinus monticola) , which at this 
altitude are small, slender trees and extremely at- 
tractive. The trail we rode was known as Huck- 
leberry Trail, though I failed to find any huckle- 
berries. As it dropped down the wild, rocky side 
of the cove, growing ever dryer underfoot, till at 
last the yellow pines appeared again, and between 
their coppery boles was neither snow nor ferns nor 
moss nor herbage, but brown, naked pumice, our 
guide, whose home was in eastern Oregon, pulled 
up his horse, wiped his dripping forehead, looked all 
about him and then out over the ridges ahead to 
the far plains, and exclaimed with emotion: 

"Back in God's country!" 

He was half aware of the humor in his heartfelt 
exclamation, and his eyes twinkled. 

" Yes, I know it's dry," he added. *' I know we 



216 SKYLINE CAMPS 

get only nine inches of precipitation a year — if we*re 
lucky. I know everything you can say to me. 
Just the same, it's God's country." 

With that he squared his shoulders, hit his horse 
with his heels, and resumed the march. 

Curiously enough, I had a feeling, too vague for 
words, that he was right. After our daj^s by the 
Rogue River, after a week at Crater Lake, amid 
the pumice and lava, between the blue water and 
the cloudless blue sky, after our visit in Bend and 
our rides through the yellow pines, I had thought 
it something of a relief to get over the slopes into 
a forest where the mould was dark and damp, where 
ferns grew and lush grass, where the giant Doug- 
las spruces told of endless moisture, and the snow 
was like our own winter come again. Yet now I 
had the curious sensation of coming back home, as 
we dropped down the parched trail into the copper- 
sheathed forest. 

Once, in the dust of the trail, I came upon the 
tracks of two bear cubs, which had evidently been 
playing there within a few hours, but no other life 
was encountered; even the birds were strangely ab- 
sent. Jefferson was no longer visible behind us, 
and in front, now, the trail stretched through the 
open pine woods that seemed to offer you long 
vistas, but actually confused the eye with a bari'ier 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 217 

of light and shade and copper trunks in a short dis- 
tance. The way, however, was growing less and 
less steep, and suddenly widened to a cart track, or 
lumber road. We kicked our horses to a trot, and 
left behind us a thin cloud of dust to drift off be- 
tween the trees. Five miles more, and we jogged 
into a cleared and pleasant grove beside Eagle 
Creek, which the neat signs of the Forest Service 
informed us was a public camp ground. The 
creek itself was a shallow stream, clear as spring 
water, rippling over stones, and the horses sank 
their muzzles into it, while we hurried for our cujds. 
It was three o'clock. We had made twenty miles 
from Hunt's Cove, on a hasty breakfast, and here 
we unloaded the horses and ate our belated lunch. 

From here, too, a motor road led down to the 
ranger station where our cars were stored, so while 
the rest of us waited, the drivers rode on and 
brought the cars back. In the interval I explored 
the banks of Eagle Creek, looking for more of the 
lovely polemonium. I did not find it, however, 
though I came upon a little green swale full of 
monkey flowers, and everywhere in the dry woods 
near the stream were blossoms of many kinds, most 
of them small and comparatively inconspicuous, 
but which could be massed for pretty effects in dry 
places. There is no reason why Oregon gardens 



218 SKYLINE CAMPS 

should lack for bloom the season through, in every 
corner, wet or dry, sunny or shaded, if the garden- 
ers will but use their own native wild flowers. Their 
problems are far easier than ours in the East, 
where, for instance, midsummer brings an almost 
complete blank in shaded places, and the hot, dry, 
sunny ledge is equally a problem. As yet, how- 
ever, gardening in Oregon is in its infancy, and the 
average man's resources are exhausted after he has 
planted roses in every available spot on his grounds 
and even along the curbstone of the sidewalk. 

It was after six o'clock before we had the motors 
packed again, and left Eagle Creek, our guides, 
and the faithful horses. We drove to a ranch be- 
side the enormous springs which gush the Metolius 
River up out of the ground into a lush green 
meadow, and here a supper awaited us, a supper 
strangely like that you might get in some White 
Mountain farmhouse, except for the lack of maple 
sugar. It was a pleasant change from camp fare, 
and it reached an unexpected and thrilling climax 
with a perfect lemon pie. When I say a perfect 
lemon pie, I do not speak lightly. I know some- 
thing about pies. In fact, by inheritance and in- 
tensive training, I am a connoisseur in joies. Of 
all pies, perhaps, a lemon pie is the most difficult 
to make, the best when made j^roperly, the worst 



ASCENT OF MOUNT JEFFERSON 219 

(always excex^ting that monstrosity, the prune pie) , 
when not made j)roperly. The one that was now 
set before us, on a red tablecloth, illumined by a 
glass oil lamp with a stiff paper shade such as I 
had not seen since boj^hood, was more than an inch 
thick, topped by a half inch of whij)ped meringue 
browned just enough, with little golden drops glis- 
tening upon it. The filling was not jellied into 
stiffness, but yielded to the fork like ripe Camem- 
bert cheese. It was sweetly acid to the taste, the 
true lemon flavor, and under it the browned crust 
was dry and flaky, without a hint of sogginess. In 
short, a perfect pie! Had there been another, we 
would certainly have camped that night beside the 
ranch and had it for breakfast. But, alas! there 
wasn't, nor, its creator informed us, any more 
lemons nearer than Bend, fifty miles away. So we 
departed, singing its praises. 

We departed by moonlight, quite certain that 
we knew our way back to Bend. But nobody 
knows his way in eastern Oregon, apparently. 
Even the road makers are so uncertain of it that 
they don't dare put any direction posts at the forks, 
and no two people whom you ask at the scattered 
homesteads tell you the same thing. We left the 
ranch at 8:30, with fifty miles to go. We got to 
Bend at two in the morning, shivering with cold, 



220 SKYLINE CAMPS 

having traversed most of eastern Oregon. We 
were a sun-scorched, unshaven, rough-looking out- 
fit, clothing torn by the fallen timber, boots soaked 
shapeless by the days of wading in the snow, tired, 
cold, sleepy, and grimed with dust, who burst 
through the doors of the Pilot Butte Inn, dragging 
our dunnage bags behind us, and roused the night 
clerk from his slumbers. 



VI 

Sentinels of the Sage 



SENTINELS OF THE SAGE 




LACES no less than people have 
their definite personalities, ingra- 
tiating or otherwise, and no two 
mountain ranges, no two deserts are 
alike. The aspect of the Rocky 
Mountains as they leap up out of the rolling, flower- 
gemmed prairie, is totally different from the aspect 
of the Cascades as they spring from the timber that 
borders the sage brush. Neither in Washington 
above, nor in California to the south, even, is the 
effect the same as in Oregon. Each has its own 
charm, and its own especial admirers. The long 
blue wave line of the Rockies, presenting an un- 
broken though peaked and castellated crest, which 
seems ever about to break and spill on that endless 
rolling carpet of wild flowers, is a noble sight. The 
upheaval is sudden, without warning of foothills, 
and in the space of half a dozen miles you pene- 
trate from pasture to precipice, from pastures 
golden with gaillardias, and lilac with bergamot, to 

precipices that hold the colors of the wild flowers in 

223 



224 SKYLINE CAMPS 

their exposed strata of earth crust. The colors of 
the Painted Desert, of the Grand Canon to the 
south, are all to be found in the j)rairie grass and 
the cliff walls of Montana, subdued no doubt, and 
precipitated upon you in less palpitating masses, 
but there just the same. 

But the Cascade Range, seen from the sage 
brush of eastern Oregon, is something totally dif- 
ferent. It has a beauty and a haunting mystery 
all its own, that have remained unsung no doubt 
because so few travelers have had the chance to 
feel them. To secure this view you must go far 
off the beaten track, and you must go in a motor, 
for the railroad branch coming down from the main 
line on the Columbia as far as Bend winds its way 
at the bottom of the Deschutes River canon. Be- 
fore long, to be sure, the motoring will not be dif- 
ficult, for the state is extending its highways with 
astonishing energy and engineering courage. But 
there is still time to take your country in the 
rough. 

Leaving Bend one morning, we motored fifty 
miles back into the range to Elk Lake, a lovely pond 
in the woods at the foot of South Sister, one of a 
group of three ten-thousand-foot snow peaks that 
stand close together. The road to Elk Lake was 
a track through the yellow pines, and was chiefly 



SENTINELS OF THE SAGE 225 

notable for its serpentine character. An Oregoniun 
from those parts assured us that once he had great 
difficulty hauling in a load of hay over that road, 
because the horses kept eating it from the tail of 
the wagon. We spent a dismal night at Elk Lake, 
in the midst of a convention of editors. Not that 
I have any aversion to editors — in their proper 
place; they have been extraordinarily kind and pa- 
tient with me, and I am normally disposed to be 
the same with them. But when they are assem- 
bled together in camp by a mountain lake, in the 
heart of the wilderness, they add very little to the 
charms of nature. Firecrackers, fish horns, and 
oratory are poor substitutes for the tinkle of brooks 
and the soft lap of waves and the sudden, startling 
slap of a fish jumping for a fly in the midnight 
moon path. We left the editors in the morning, 
and cut across lots, headed southeast, passing more 
than one sad equivalent of the New England aban- 
doned farm. There were clearings in the pine 
woods, where a few stumps had been hauled from 
the parched volcanic ash which is the soil, a rough 
board cabin and barn erected and perhaps a fence 
or two — and then the whole effort abandoned by the 
homesteader. Nor did you wonder at it, for with- 
out irrigation no farming could well be more dis- 
couraging. Dry farming on a large scale, M^here 



226 SKYLINE CAMPS 

the fields alternately to lie fallow are extensive and 
already clear, and where the return can be large 
enough, also, to buy some of the luxuries of life, 
may be a possible existence. But to clear a dry 
farm in the forest, and to depend for all one's sub- 
sistence on what those few parched acres can pro- 
duce, requires something less than courage; I 
should rather call it feeble-mindedness. 

By afternoon we had lunched and crossed the 
north-and-south highway at La Pine, and then, for 
a matter of fourteen miles, we traveled in low 
speed, steadily up and up and up, through the 
never-ending forest of yellow pines. Once we 
stopped and lowered the cameras down a thirty- 
foot cliff, sliding down the rope after them, to pho- 
tograph Paulina Falls, where they leap into a gorge 
they had cut in the lava. Then we resumed 
our low-speed grind. We were climbing a moun- 
tain called Newberry Crater, an old volcano not, 
some think, entirely devoid of life yet, which stands 
many miles east of the range. The outer rim of 
the summit is over eight thousand feet high, but 
the road runs into and across the bottom of the cra- 
ter, a considerable area of wild, desolate heaps of 
lava fragments and cinder piles, interspersed with 
stunted forest, and holding two fine lakes, full of 
big fighting trout. We camped that night by the 



SENTINELS OF THE SAGE 227 

larger of the lakes, at the base of a volcanic slag 
heap fifty feet high and a quarter of a mile long, 
composed of gloomy black fragments of flint-like 
obsidian mixed Avith chmiks of pumice stone as light 
as dry sponges. In these piles the Indians got their 
arrowheads and other implements; but they were 
gloomy as some circle of Dante's hell, and over us 
lowered a black thundercloud, breaking in the only 
rain we saw all summer, a rain so bitter cold we 
expected it to turn into snow at any moment. I am 
not advocating Newberry Crater as a resort for 
any but confirmed anglers and geologists. In- 
deed, I mention our camp upon it merely because it 
proved to be the gateway to one of the loveliest 
prospects America affords. 

All signs of the storm had vanished before morn- 
ing, and the sun rose clear. The air was not only 
clear, it was autumn cold, a north wind lashing up 
soapy waves on the green lake. We shivered 
around the breakfast fire, and later sought out the 
sheltered southern side of a slag heap for a scena- 
rio conference. Huddled over our slips of manu- 
script, with the piles of polished black fragments of 
obsidian, the lumps of pumice, the broken-up spew 
of past eruptions, heaped behind and around us, we 
must have looked like conspirators in some burnt- 
out hell. In the afternoon we started down the 



228 SKYLINE CAMPS 

mountain by a new Forest Service road on the 
northeast side, a steep climb over the rim of the cra- 
ter, and then a long descent through a dry forest 
clothing the ash heap which is the mountain, with 
constant vistas through the trees of the far-stretch- 
ing, blue-green desert of eastern Oregon. 

At the bottom of the mountain we found our- 
selves still in the yellow-pine forest, and for a long 
time we rode through its park-like monotony of 
gently undulating vistas down sun-flecked aisles be- 
tween the gleaming cojjper columns. All the au- 
tumnal chill of the crater had vanished down here. 
The dust rose in clouds behind our wheels, and the 
scant herbage hung parched and breathless in the 
heat. There is something still and uncanny about 
a desert foi'est (if one may employ that adjective 
and noun together) . The mystery of such im- 
pressive tree growth in so arid a soil, the absence of 
soft gTcenery along the forest floor, the hush, the 
endless monotonj^ become hypnotic in time, and 
bring a great drowsiness upon you. 

After perhaps twenty miles of this forest, we 
broke suddenly out of it into a great hollow of sage 
brush, a shallow pan a mile wide. The sharp edge 
of the pines was behind us, and on the other three 
sides the naked earth swelled up in a circular ridge, 
cutting against the sky. Sage brush, a little sparse 



SENTINELS OF THE SAGE 229 

grass, a startled jack-rabbit scampering away, a 
white scar of road cutting the hollow and mounting 
over the western rim — and the dome of blue. Have 
you ever s^vum, or rowed in a small boat, far out 
from shore, when the sea was running in long, heav- 
ing swells? You ride on the crest of a swell, then 
you slide down its polished incline and find your- 
self in a green hollow, your vision quite cut off and 
only the wave crests all around you undulating in 
a sharp, translucent line against the sky. Imagine 
that wave hollow to be a mile across, and you have 
something the sensation that was ours when our 
car first broke out of the pines into the naked sage. 
We sped across the hollow, and as the car took the 
incline of the western ridge at high speed, the sen- 
sation was still that of riding a wave. Up and 
over she went, and then seemed to hang of her own 
accord, arrested by the sudden prospect. 

Ahead of us stretched mile after mile of rolling 
sage brush, till the far-off, hazy forest began, rising 
in green waves of timbered foothill buttes to break 
at last against the blue rampart of the range. And 
rising from this range, remote, mj'-sterious, dazzling, 
icy-white and beautiful, from Diamond Peak to 
the southwest clear to Jefferson in the north, stood 
the sentinel summits — the Three Sisters, Broken 
Top, Washington, Three Fingered Jack, with old 



230 SKYLINE CAMPS 

Jefferson himself the highest, the most remote, the 
most inaccessible and alluring. He might have 
been a pyramid of glistening cloud. These peaked 
white volcanoes, shooting up so far above the level 
of the blue range, seem to hold mystic converse one 
with another over the canons between. Here in 
the desert, forty miles away from the nearest of 
them, their lower ledges were indistinguishable; 
they were solid cones of white. Indistinguishable, 
too, were the separate lower peaks around them. 
They but towered the crest of an unbroken wall. 
The nearer green buttes, however, were separate 
entities, swelling out of a dim sea of forest, and in 
that middle space of forest and foothills between the 
rolling sage and the snow-clad pyramids was Wag- 
ner's " mystic abyss ". At Bayreuth, you remem- 
ber, he and his architect strove to create a certain 
space between the spectators and the stage which 
should serve to throw the stage pictures and the ac- 
tion back across a gulf, into a realm removed from 
the close contact of the actual. This space thej'^ 
called " the mystic abyss ". There is no mystic 
abyss as you approach the Rocky Mountains over 
the prairies. But here we found it, and those great 
dazzling cones which aspired so sublimely into the 
western skj^ with the low sun dropping down to 
kindle their summits, were as cool, as aloof, as 



SENTINELS OF THE SAGE 231 

charged with mystery and portent, as the white gods 
of a dream. . . . 

Three tents at the edge of the pine woods, be- 
tween the coppery columns. Beyond, and away, 
the long swells of the sage brush, with twilight 
creeping into the hollow like a purple shadow. In 
the east, a belt of mother-of-pearl along the hori- 
zon, tinting upward into pink, salmon in the west, 
and then the faded afterglow where the snow peaks 
float in a bath of light. One by one, as night came 
on, they grew more cloud-like, more ethereal, seem- 
ing to dissolve in air. Jefferson went first. The 
Three Sisters lingered, floating white without any 
base, long after the eye, cast down into the hollow 
of the sage brush, or trying to penetrate the aisles 
of the forest, reported that darkness had come. 
Then they, too, vanished, and from the naked 
ridges of the open country we saw our camp fire 
gleam red and friendly in the purple wall of pines, 
while overhead the stars blazed out and through the 
sage brush at our feet whimpered the plaintive 
ghost of a lost wind. 

The road from Bend northward to The Dalles, 
on the Columbia River, is a long, hard day's trip, 
but it has its constant fascinations, because for 
miles on end you travel across bare country, along 



232 SKYLINE CAMPS 

ridges and xilateaus, which give you uninterrupted 
view of the sentinel snow summits. Sometimes 
you see them across acres upon acres of golden 
wheat, sometimes across sage brush, sometimes 
across desert land of gray ash and lava spew, where 
even the sage is discouraged. And once, at least, 
you see Jefferson in all its breadth and height, 
across the yawning chasm of the Deschutes canon. 
The canon is a Avild gorge plowed out of a wild 
and arid land. Behind you lies nothing but seem- 
ing desert, wave upon wave of sun-parched dreari- 
ness. At your feet yawns a gulf of desolation. 
But across this gulf, across this mystic abj^ss, rises 
the white mountain, glittering with ice and snow, 
cool, serene, its attendant foothills verdure-clad. 

Again, the road plunges you into some canon, 
and you lose all sight of mountain or plain, con- 
fined between naked, jagged walls of volcanic 
stuff, where you come with a shock of surprise on 
flowing water, a field of fragrant alfalfa, and then 
a white house, with a white picket fence, sitting as 
peacefully under its great poplar trees as if it were 
in old New England. When I was a boy, I used 
to read with delight a poem by Whittier about a 
sea captain who was wrecked in an arid country 
and made a vow that if he were saved he would go 
home and dig a well beside the highway. He was 



SENTINELS OF THE SAGE 233 

saved, and he went home and dug the well. The 
poem always made me deliciously thirsty, so I had 
to go out to the pump as soon as I'd finished it. 
This poem came back to me when we reached, in 
the heart of Antelope Canon, the trickling stream, 
the narrow band of green alfalfa, the white house 
with its clean, fresh fence, its riot of roses, its 
cool-shadowing trees. I had not been thirsty 
before, but now I had to drain a canteen of its last 
drop. 

Again the road led down a long steep grade, dug 
perilously out of the side wall of a tributary ero- 
sion gulch, to reach the bridge across the Deschutes 
River. There was an incredibly hot and dusty and 
treeless and beauty-less little town at the bottom, 
and then a staggering grade on the other side, till 
we reached the level again and saw the serene pyra- 
mid of Mount Hood in front of us, and felt the cool 
wind sweeping down from the snows. Yet another 
descent, to another town, less dusty and blessed 
with trees, and then yet another endless climb, six 
miles of road that wound up the side of a naked 
canon, with no guard rail and no chance to see 
around the bends what was coming toward you, six 
miles in low speed with the hole in the earth stead- 
ily deepening almost under your wheels — and then 
Mount Hood again, nearer now, its glaciers glit- 



234 SKYLINE CAMPS 

tering, and a long downward race through miles of 
wheat and the outposts of the orchards, to the final 
plunge into the gorge of the Columbia. 



VII 
The Columbia Highway 



THE COLUMBIA HIGHWAY 




HE Columbia Highway is in every 
way extraordinary — in its length, 
its conquest of engineering difficul- 
ties, its rugged j)icturesqueness, its 
blessed iiiiniunity, for a consider- 
able portion of its extent, from advertising signs, 
its almost constant companionship with the great 
green river that gives it name. But it was not on 
the Columbia Highway that I received my parting 
thrill from Oregon, when, following our trip from 
Bend to The Dalles, we ran down the Highway to 
Portland. It was on a detour. We didn't have to 
take this detour ; we could wait until twelve o'clock, 
when the main road would be opened. In fact, we 
were strongly advised not to take it. But as the 
hour was then 8:30, and as our cars had been con- 
quering impossible grades and traversing dizzy 
ledges for a month past, we saw no particular rea- 
son for sitting idly in front of a steam roller all the 
morning. We turned up the detour road. 

A detour on the Columbia Highway, before it 

237 



238 SKYLINE CAMPS 

breaks through into the plams, is not a simple mat- 
ter. The Columbia River to reach the sea had to 
break tlirough the foundation basalt of the Cascade 
Mountains. It succeeded admirably in this for- 
midable task, but it wasted no effort in the process ; 
it made a gorge large enough to pour its own waters 
through, but left very little room for anything else 
to negotiate the passage. The railroad manages 
to hug the lower bank, but there were times when 
the Highway engineers could get past some pre- 
cipitous headland or sheer cliff only by climbing 
over it or tunneling through. It was a sufficient 
task to build one such road ; naturally there are not 
two. So when a detour is called for, there is noth- 
ing to do but climb some old road leading up a side 
gorge to the very to^) of the basalt barrier into Avhich 
the river has cut for two thousand feet, and wind 
along over the top till j^ou find another old road 
leading down again. These old roads, of course, 
were laid out (or, rather, they happened) before 
the days of motors, and probably before the days 
of wagons. It was one of them which we now took, 
leading upward beside a rushing brook. The grade 
was not as bad as some we had encountered else- 
where in the state. It may have reached twenty 
per cent, in spots, but in the Siskiyou canon we had 
surmounted a grade of thirty per cent. There was 



THE COLUMBIA HIGHWAY 239 

nothing to do but keep on, anyway, having once 
started. To turn around was quite impossible, and 
to back down the act of a madman. So we kept on, 
for five or six miles, passing a few pathetic little or- 
chards which had been hopefully planted in clear- 
ings on the slope, much as our pioneer New Eng- 
land farms were often hung on our hills, to leave us 
wondering to-day not that they have been aban- 
doned, but why they ever were there at all. The top 
of the ridge was heavily timbered, and when we be- 
gan to descend, down a deeply cut erosion gorge, it 
v/as still in timber. We had dropped some little 
distance, with our engine in first speed compression 
and our brakes protesting, while we prayed that no- 
body was trying to come up the hill to meet us, be- 
fore we rounded a turn-out high up on the side of 
the gorge, and the view suddenly smote us. 

I loiow of nothing quite like that view elsewhere 
in America. Just to our left, the side of the gorge 
fell away from under our very wheels into a hole 
filled with dark fir trees, and then rose again on the 
farther side to a jagged skyline. In front of us 
the gorge opened directly into the Hood River 
valley, but at such an acute angle that we looked up 
the valley as well as into it. Out of the dusky fir 
shadows of our gorge, as out of some window in a 
great, dim house, we saw the bright green orchards 



240 SKYLINE CAMPS 

swimming in sunlight, too rank, too luxuriant, to 
form checkerboards, but still with a certain plan 
to their composition as the white roads threaded be- 
tween them and the white houses or the red barns 
peeped from their enveloping green. Across the 
valley rose the hills again, but it was up the valley 
that our eyes traveled, up a valley that grew nar- 
rower and narrower, its bounding green hills higher 
and bluer, to meet at last in the supreme mountain, 
the Fujiyama of Oregon, the snow-white, dazzling, 
serene pyramid of Mount Hood. It was, perhaps, 
twenty-five miles away, but in this clear air it looked 
not more than ten. Exactly at the valley's head, it 
swept the whole composition into focus at its base, 
took it up its symmetrical slopes, and drew it to the 
dazzling needle point of its summit peak far up 
against the blue. Or better, perhaps, it radiated 
the composition down from that sky-borne summit, 
with its dropping glaciers, as their waters come 
down to put the juice into the apples and cherries. 
If Hood River were like Wenatchee, or like a 
hundred other irrigated orchard settlements, this 
view would lose much of its incomparable charm. 
But this is not an arid land. Looking down on 
it from the hills, you see little or none of the bare 
gray soil, nor are the slopes that hem it in naked 
rock and lava. The slox)es are dark with fir, and 



THE COLUMBIA HIGHWAY 241 

the valley floor seems as happily verdant as some 
English vale. The whole valley is pastoral under 
its flood of golden sunshine, and over it broods the 
majesty of a single and supreme snow mountain. I 
had once known a Hood River man who abandoned 
an excellent position in New York, holding the 
promise of fame and fortune, to go back home 
again. Now, at last, I understood. 

We lunched that day in Hood River, at the house 
of friends, with a tablecloth spread on the lawn un- 
der cherry trees that still bore a few dark fruits 
overlooked by the pickers. From this lawn Mount 
Hood was neighborly, looming over the orchard 
trees to the southward, while northward, across the 
gorge of the Columbia, we could see Mount Adams 
hanging like a white cloud. There was already a 
smell of apples, faint but unmistakable, from the 
early fall varieties. There were garden flowers 
blooming beside the house, along the paths, for 
Hood River has long passed the boom-town stage. 
For a community which takes all its riches from 
the soil, it is strangely compact and neighborly, too, 
each grower living in the centre of his ten acres or 
so of orchard, so that the valley supports a large 
population and everybody is within easy reach of 
the town at the lower end, where Hood River joins 
the Columbia. It seems, to the casual tourist, a 



242 SKYLINE CAMPS 

kind of Arcadia, where every Arcadian o's\tis a mo- 
tor car and watches the sunset gild Mount Hood. 

From Hood River to Portland we followed once 
more the Columbia Highway, winding under cas- 
tellated cliffs and past the feet of far-leaping water- 
falls, or climbing by winding grades uj) through 
the fir forest to reach the top of some headland two 
thousand feet above the river, whence the ej'^e swept 
for miles back into the splendid gorge, and saw, 
across the river to the north, the snow summits of 
Adams and St. Helen's. Some of the cliffs beside 
the Highway look as if they would afford excel- 
lent rock climbing, this basaltic formation being 
much harder and firmer than the superimposed vol- 
canic stuff of the higher Cascades. But we had to 
pass them by, to save, perhai)s, for that " next 
time" which you alwaj^s promise yourself when 
you are leaving the West. 

Running out of the gorge at last into the plain, 
it was not alone that the natural beauty of the 
scene grew less ; those most abominable evidences of 
man, the roadside sign -boards, became suddenly 
apparent. They came upon us with a horrid shock. 
Never, I think, had they seemed to me quite so ugly, 
so stupid, so symbolic of what is worst and cheapest 
in our civilization, as on this day. The state of 
Oregon has so far managed to keep them out of the 



THE COLUMBIA HIGHWAY 243 

Columbia gorge, but that appears to be the best it 
can do. Through the j)lains to Portland they 
flaunt their ugliness as in any Jersey suburb. It 
is a curious commentary on our particular stage of 
semi-civilization that we will tax ourselves millions 
of dollars to build scenic highways, from a genuine 
love, apparently, of the escape thus offered into re- 
gions of natural beauty, and then have neither the 
sense nor the courage to control the greed of the 
few who promptly disfigTire the landscape with 
hideous signs. My own village, an old and elm- 
shaded New England street, lies on a main high- 
way through the Berkshire Hills. Directly at the 
approach, just before you cross a bridge and go in 
under the first arch of elms, a well-known tire com- 
pany which dispenses historical information of du- 
bious accuracy by means of sign-boards, has erected 
a vast open book completely destroying the charm 
of the picture. I do not greatly blame that com- 
pany for wanting to sell its tires, though I have 
never bought one of them since that sign went up ; 
but how about the citizen of our village who, for a 
measly five dollars a year, rents his lot for this dis- 
figurement? And how about us, the community, 
who bow to some fetish about the sanctity of per- 
sonal property, and let him do it? Is it because we 
are all so greedy that we dare not interfere with 



244 SKYLINE CAMPS 

another's grabbing? Or is it that we are still cal- 
lous to beauty, after all, and these signs do not hurt 
us? I had hoped, hearing so much of the Colum- 
bia Highwa}'-, and the enormous motor taxes Ore- 
gonians were willing to pay in order to put it 
through, that the state would have the courage to 
wipe out the sign-board pest. But they have only 
partially done it. They have kept the sign-boards 
out of the gorge, but not out of the quieter, pastoral 
landscaj)e through which you must pass to reach 
the gorge, and which could have a charm and beauty 
of its own. 

At any rate, these sign-boards reminded me pain- 
fully of the East. They screamed to me, in huge 
type and lurid colors, of crowds and cities and the 
ugly blotches man has made on the fair face of Na- 
ture. They said my camping days were over, and 
a hot, stuffy train awaited me, to take me home. 
How wonderful, I thought, is modern industrial- 
ism! Sign after sign rose up beside the highway, 
blotting out a vista of the river or a pretty group of 
trees, or the level rows of an orchard, to inform me 
of the merits of various " national products " which 
are advertised by identical sign-boards three thou- 
sand miles away, staring at me whenever I take a 
train to New York, or drive to the next town to 
play golf. Wonderful, thrice wonderful indus- 



THE COLUMBIA HIGHWAY 245 

trialism! It can make Oregon as ugly as Massa- 
chusetts! Let us sj)eed uj) production. Let us turn 
out ever vaster quantities of tires and chewing gum, 
and blot out ever more beautiful vistas in our greed 
to sell them. Thus shall we become a prosperous 
and happy people, with plenty of leisure to enjoy 
Nature — if, by that time, we can see any of it, be- 
tween the sign-boards. 

That is just about how I felt as our car slid into 
Portland, and my vacation was over. 



THE END 



iiBiilllBliilii 




